10 Foundations of Business Success

I have recently been reading 10 Foundations of Business Success, an excellent very practical book by my friend and colleague Guy Hamilton. Guy spent 35 years with global banking giant HSBC Group.

With Guy’s permission, I am very happy to share some of his wisdom, starting with a summary of the 10 Foundations.  These are straight forward to understand, and provide the necessary platform from which a good business can grow.  Manager improve business performance through concentrating on what really matters.

Here’s a summary of the 10 foundation disciplines and how they flow:

1. You start by getting very clear on the industry and market segments you wish to operate in, now and in the future. Correctly, identifying segments, the market dynamics influencing a business and how to react to them is market segmentation.
2. Next you need to form a clear view of what a target customer looks like, where you might find them and what they “need”. Clear target customer profiles are at the heart of successful marketing, sales and servicing. By being relevant to target customers you increase the chance of sales success. We look at this under customer needs.
3. With a clear with of your market/s and customers, the next discipline is to clearly define your value proposition. What are the points of differentiation for your business? How will you deliver real value to a customer – in turn building engagement and future sales and revenues?
4. Now you need to shape a business model that consistently delivers the required customer experiences and point of differentiation. So we look at how building a customer-centric business creates engagement and success. We also examine the flip side: making sure internal processes and systems do not dictate what a customer sees and feels.
5. When you understand the what, where and how of your business you can define the use key metrics, which enable successful performance management. Simply: what gets measured gets done.
6. The business world is constantly changing, so dealing with “the competition” is vital. This means taking a disciplined approach to on-going competitor analysis and tracking. Keeping your view of the external environment can greatly improve your ability to move with market changes and trends.
7. Good strategy and business models must at some stage move into the hard-edged world of tasks, accountabilities and competencies. You need to asses whether the business has the right mix of skills and competencies to reach its target outcomes. Your Staff need to take ownership of their parts of the puzzle and deliver them on time and within budget.
8. Now you need to look at “joining up” all the parts of your business, building an organisation that can deliver on your promises to the customer, and which has identified and is managing the dependencies within different parts of its business.
9. One key measure of success is finance, and good financial results depend on cost and margin management. If you look after costs and margins, profits tend to look after themselves!
10. Last, but by no means least, the success of a business will come down to the passion, commitment and communication used to drive it forward. Engaging your employees and customers is directly linked to your passion and sense of purpose in the business – and how this is communicated internally and externally.

I will share further insights from Guy in coming posts.