Reassessing/revising your vision

  • Why did you start this business?  Is that still what drives you?
  • What did your original plan assume about your customer, your offer, or your market that’s no longer true?
  • What problem are you solving today that you didn’t even know existed at launch? What problem did you plan to solve that no one ended up caring about?
  • What feedback have you been ignoring because it doesn’t fit the original vision?
  • Are you building the business you planned, or the one your customers and results have actually been teaching you to build?
  • Has your market moved faster than your plan has?

Customer value proposition – and profit value

  • What are you still offering because it seemed like a good idea when you started, not because the numbers support it now?
  • Which products, channels, or processes cost you more in complexity today than they produce in margin?  How did they get that way?  Can cost & complexity be addressed?
  • What’s the true cost — including time, training, errors, stress — of the most complicated thing you’re still doing simply because “that’s how it’s always worked”?

Who are your customers, really?

  • How would you design, market and price your products or services to serve the customers and marketplace you’ve actually experienced?
  • Which products, customers, channels or marketing strategies would disappear completely (or be significantly diminished)?
  • How is your best customer today different from your best customer two or three years ago?
  • What needs are your current best customers trying to solve?  How has this changed?

Improving operations

  • How would you staff, what would be your organizational structure and processes, if you were designing the business from scratch, knowing what you know now?
  • Where have you created unnecessary work or complexity based on what you thought would happen rather than what actually has?

Starting to change

  • What’s one thing you could cut this month that would make everything else easier?
  • What’s the story you tell yourself about why you can’t make the changes you know you ought to make?

Want more information on growing your business

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