There is a place (a big place!) for custom work – people pay more to get difficult jobs done well, and the craft required gives you an opportunity to do work that people will notice and “cross the street for.” But if everything you do is complex and nuanced, such that every quote is a custom quote, and every sale…
Category: users and customers
Every successful business has a monopoly—a monopoly on what it makes that someone else can’t make the way they make it. That leaves out commodity businesses—people who bring coal out of the ground. I don’t think of those businesses as particularly successful. I think of them as useful. I’m glad if I need a bag of coal someone’s doing it,…
However well things are going, from time to time you might get worried about the competition – people who do what you do, who look like they might be doing it better or cheaper. It’s important to know what’s going on, to think about what you can learn and why. And it’s even more important to think about what it…
More accessible Disruptive Innovations are NOT breakthrough technologies that make good products better; rather they are innovations that make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a larger population. Christensen Institute Could you make it… … cheaper? … easier to discover? … easier to find out more about? … easier to get hold of? ……
It’s simple, but so rarely done well: put yourself in your customers’ shoes at every point of interaction with your organisation and ask “What do I need at this moment? What would help me, and make me feel helped?” This photo is classic Changi – just after immigration and the bustle of putting your passports away, as you look up…
We usually need several things to come together before we actually make a change. 1. See that the change is possible We learn what’s possible through exposure (seeing a thing happen or be done), experience (doing things ourselves that suggest similar things might be possible) and education (being taught, or self-teaching, about what has and can and could happen). 2.…
It’s good to keep your products – and I include services as part of product – as focused as possible on the needs of your customers. One catch is that you are almost certainly serving multiple costumers: The people you hope to impact with your product End users of your product The people choosing and buying your product Any other…
It means all kinds of things if the client or user of a non-profit organisation’s services pays. The organisation will be focused on the client, and their needs – “She who pays the piper calls the tune.” The non-profit will be able to charge only in proportion to the usefulness of the service they provide (and in proportion to the…
“Who pays?” is an important question for all sorts of reasons. In the world of non-profits, donors often pay. This can mean: That the charity is free to act in the best interests of the people it seeks to serve, unburdened by the demands of the market and client’s ability to pay That the charity is beholden to the whim…
A long queue for what you’re selling is a good problem to have. It means people want what you have, and are willing to pay the price you’re asking and pay the additional time it takes them to queue to get it. It means that what you’re selling is scarce – you might even have a monopoly. The question is,…