10 Things to Do to Create a Great Business

How can a business move from good to great? Here are 10 things they need to do to achieve that accolade.

Firstly the top team need to get a shared strategy – where are we going and what are our priorities? Strategy is the start point for all great businesses. Part of this process is to develop a compelling vision which inspires customers and employees to want to be involved with the business. ‘If we were in 2015 and we were very successful what would we have accomplished’?

Great businesses require great leaders. Leaders set stretch goals that inspire people to go the extra mile and produce results beyond expectations. A recent major study of what people wanted from their leaders was honesty, inspiration and competence.

In order to create customers, great businesses focus on effective networking which has the highest correlation with successful business growth. How do great businesses actually create new customers from network contacts? They use the entrepreneurial approach to business development. Find a real customer problem, solve it and then sell the solution to everyone else. That’s it. Simple but incredibly powerful.

Once they have created customers, great businesses set out to delight them in order to keep them. The benefits of delighting customers are high levels of repeat business, new opportunities from referrals from delighted customers and a lowering of sensitivity to price.

Running a great business requires great people. How many of your people consistently produce results beyond your expectations? This is a critical business question. In the great businesses it would be many people at all levels in the business. Selection is a key business task.

Great businesses also control they key factors in their recipe for success. This might be product quality, delivery, service, personal relationships or cost. They know that what gets measured gets managed and they do not leave this to chance.

Finally, great business leaders invest in themselves. They are inquisitive, they want to learn how to do things better, they rarely get complacent or rest on their laurels. So when was the last time you read a business book, attended a training course or invested in a coach?

So there it is – 10 things to do to create a great business.