What do you do best?

Take a look at your company. What would you identify as your areas of particular strength? This could be a product, a service, or your communication with customers. As it stands, these company competencies are the reason people do business with you. Therefore, you should look to build your organisation around them for the best chance of success.

It is important you have good evidence to support this conclusion. Sometimes your excellent areas are quite different from what you might imagine. Business leaders, through no fault of their own, can become attached to certain ideas and schemes, which on the surface may look productive, but are not worth the time, effort, or financial investment. Utilise your data; focus on lead metrics, so you can predict more accurately into the future.

Your company competencies can become your differentiators, that make you stand out from the crowd. Work out what makes this such an area of strength. Once you have this solid information you can: work on replicating this advantage, promoting it to your potential customers, consider how this can be improved or made more profitable.

However, this is not a self-gratifying activity; your differentiator will not have a long shelf-life. Competitors will soon find a way of replicating this competency, so you cannot become too comfortable. Consequently, you must look at ways to evolve this strength, or even devise something new. Strategising is a vital part of this process, where anticipating future trends is well worth thinking about.

Be realistic about these developments. If your business has a limited means of production, then selling your product for under the market price is not sustainable. This evolution must be based on the advantages your company already has. This is not to say you cannot start in a completely new direction, but it will definitely require a greater amount of investment.

Uber are an organisation with a clear company competency, providing a cheap taxi service that negotiated costly commercial vehicle taxes. Alongside their easy-to-use application, this made getting from A-to-B, both more convenient and also more secure, with traceable driver identities. However, Uber have expanded beyond these competitive advantages to offer a takeaway service – Uber eats. With their existing tech-savvy and fleet of vehicles, this built on their competencies and provided a new market.

What are your current company competencies? Consider how these could develop in the future.