In my last article, we started to discuss how we built a business strategy at my most recent dealership rescue. We had worked to figure out our value proposition centered around transparency, collaboration, and speed.
This was the first of three areas that help to define a business’ strategy:
Value Proposition
Business Opportunities
Internal Growth and Changes
Today, we’ll be talking about item two on the list.
Next Up: Business Opportunities
In order to understand our unique business opportunities, we needed to understand our competitors. We begin a S.W.O.T. analysis of each of them. What were their Strengths? Their Weaknesses? What were our Opportunities? Their Threats to us? We also had to assume that our competitors were not “standing still,” or that they were working like us to improve their businesses. To assess our business opportunities, we did the following:
We assessed each competitor in four ways:
Their recent activity: were they growing?
Their inventory: what did they have in stock and what were their pricing models?
Their technology: was it friction free and customer friendly?
Their people: how did their team stack up against ours?
We then reviewed their value proposition and benchmarked it against our new proposed model:
Did we have a brand advantage?
A price advantage?
An experience advantage?
Last, we assessed what we needed to do to change the market and dominate the competition while increasing connections with customers quickly.
In our next article, I’ll discuss internal growth and changes.
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