Steps to Launch Your Dream Startup
In order to succeed in business, it is essential to follow a specific sequence known as the 7P's sequence. Each element of the sequence plays a crucial role in the overall success of a business. These elements include: Problem, Prospect, People, Product, Pricing & Positioning, Process & Performance, and Profit. However, there is an additional P that should not be overlooked, and that is Purpose. Purpose is the ultimate P that binds all the other 7P's together. It is the driving force behind a business and helps to guide decision-making processes. Without a clear sense of purpose, a business may struggle to stay on track and achieve its goals. Therefore, it is imperative that businesses not only consider the 7P's but also remember to focus on their purpose.
A Journey of Self-Discovery
As a business owner, it can be challenging to navigate the various elements that come together to form a successful enterprise. However, by understanding and implementing the 8 P's of business, you can streamline your operations and achieve greater profitability.
The 8 P's, in sequence, are Prospect, People, Product, Pricing and Positioning, Process and Performance, Physical Evidence, Promotion, and Profit. Of these, the thread that ties everything together is Purpose. Purpose serves as the guiding force that drives the other P's and ensures that your business is aligned with your overall goals and mission.
Many business owners struggle with common problems, such as how to effectively sell their products or services, how to offer discounts without sacrificing profitability, and how to attract new customers. These issues are typically related to the 5th P, Pricing and Positioning. By understanding how to properly price and position your offerings, you can overcome these challenges and attract more customers while maintaining profitability.
Other common issues relate to the 3rd P, People. Business owners often struggle to retain their employees or build a strong team. By focusing on this P, you can create a positive work environment and ensure that your employees feel valued and supported.
The 6th P, Process and Performance, is also a critical element of a successful business. By refining your processes and optimizing your performance, you can boost efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Ultimately, the result of these efforts is the 7th P, Profit. By focusing on the 8 P's in sequence and aligning your business with a clear sense of purpose, you can achieve greater profitability and success.
Problem
One of the most critical aspects of starting and running a successful business is identifying the customer's burning problem. Without identifying the problem, you will not be able to gain any advantage in starting a business. It is crucial to understand what the customer's burning problem is and how you can solve it in such a way that the customer cannot solve it without you.
There are two essential questions that you must answer to identify the customer's burning problem: What is the burning problem of your customer? And, how do you solve it in such a way that the customer himself cannot solve it without you? Once you have the answers to these questions, you will be able to evaluate the market and determine whether you need to bring radical innovation or incremental innovation. This completely depends on the customer's burning problem and can be determined through customer-centricity.
Innovation and automation largely depend on which problem of the customer you are solving. You might have missed the innovation that can impact the customer's money-making model. The money-making model is the model that shows how your customer is earning money and from where he/she is earning it. Therefore, it is essential to identify how your customer can grow and how your customer's customers will grow.
Finding out the need, urgency, or problem of your customer that you are going to solve is essential because customer needs give you leads. For example, Baba Ramdev identified the need of the customers, i.e. healthy products. Therefore, he first established himself as a health ambassador or Yoga Guru. He focused on health and worked on the problem of health. Similarly, Steve Jobs believed that customer needs come first, and technology and resources come later. Thus, reverse production is real innovation.
Your business model will come out from the customer. The customer will tell you what his/her problem is and how you should solve it so that the customer cannot leave you and always come back to you. Therefore, you should always start with the perfect problem, identify the perfect problem, and not search for the customer first, but identify the customer's problem first. Do not decide the price or profit first, identify the customer's problem first. Spend 80% of your lifetime identifying the problem in the initial days of your business.
Yet, if you have stuck somewhere in your business, it is because your first P, i.e., problem, is not correct. Therefore, identifying the customer's burning problem is crucial for any business to succeed.
Prospect
To successfully sell a product or service, it is crucial to understand your target audience. This requires a deep understanding of your potential customers, including their age, educational background, religion, values, lifestyle, income bracket, location, occupation, social class, interests, gender, race, preferred type of company or association, personality, culture, mindset (bargainer or buyer), marital status, ethnicity, and aspirations.
It is essential to study your prospect's demographics, psychographics, and geography to create a strategic plan for your product or service. Demographics refer to the statistical data that describe a particular group of people, including age, gender, income, education, and occupation. Psychographics refer to the personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles of your target audience. Geography refers to the location and region where your prospects live.
By gaining a thorough understanding of your potential customers, you will be able to develop a product or service that meets their needs and desires. You can also create a marketing strategy that targets their interests, values, and lifestyle. Understanding your customer base is the key to hiring the right people, deciding on the product's pricing and positioning, and successfully selling your product or service.
People
When building a business, it is important to identify the problem you wish to solve and the customers you intend to serve. However, it is equally crucial to determine the type of people you need to hire to solve those problems and create a successful product. It is important to note that you cannot hire every type of person, so you need to plan your hiring strategy accordingly.
For instance, if you are running a service-oriented business, you need to have a leadership team that is experienced and knowledgeable. You need to hire people who are skilled in the areas that matter most to your customers. In a service-based business, customers want to work with intelligent professionals who can help them grow and succeed in their lives. Therefore, you need to hire progressive employees who can deliver on your customers' needs and expectations.
To build a talented workforce, you need to plan the following aspects of people management:
1. Hiring: Hire people who are talented, experienced, and passionate about your business.
2. People skills: Ensure that your employees have the skills needed to provide excellent customer service and solve complex problems.
3. Performance management: Set clear goals and objectives for your employees and monitor their progress to ensure that they are meeting your expectations.
4. Motivation and retention: Create a positive work environment that motivates your employees to perform at their best and encourages them to stay with your company.
5. Critical role: Identify the most critical roles in your business and ensure that you have the right people in those positions.
6. Capable manpower: Ensure that your employees have the resources and training they need to perform their jobs effectively.
7. Change management: Manage change effectively by communicating with your employees and involving them in the process.
8. Amalgamation of professionals: Create a diverse team of professionals with different backgrounds and expertise to bring fresh perspectives to your business.
9. Communication style: Develop a communication style that encourages open dialogue and fosters collaboration among your employees.
Once you have built your workforce, you need to brainstorm with your team to come up with innovative ideas that will help you solve your customers' problems. Start by discussing who your customers are and what problems they face. Then, ask your team for their ideas on how to solve these problems. Encourage your team to give you game-changing ideas and take out promising ideas from the ideas of your team. This will help you to get your team involved and committed to the ideas.
In conclusion, to build a successful business, you need to hire the right people and create a positive work environment that motivates your employees to perform at their best. You also need to involve your team in the process of generating new ideas to solve your customers' problems. With the right people and a collaborative approach, you can create a product that meets your customers' needs and exceeds their expectations.
Product
When developing a product for a business, it is important to ensure that it is sustainable in the long run. To achieve this, there are several factors that need to be considered, including building technology into the product, adding a chatbot and mobile app, and making it a platform that can cater to different types of businesses, such as C2C, B2C, B2B, B2G, and B282C. The product should also be designed to generate passive income and should undergo qualitative improvement through a quantified form.
Another important consideration is reducing the cost of the product, while ensuring that it meets the needs of the target market. It is also critical to work with a team that understands the problem that the customer is facing to ensure that the product developed is relevant and useful. During the development process, it is important to control costs and build an asset-light model that can be scaled up later on. The BCG matrix can be used to conduct a market analysis and determine where the market is going and where the product fits.
The ecosystem is another critical factor to consider when developing a product for a business. It is important to implement J curve strategies and build economies of scale to ensure that the product is sustainable in the long run. ERP should also be implemented in the technology to ensure that all aspects of the product are integrated and working properly.
Once the product is developed, it is important to conduct a pilot experiment in a small region to validate its effectiveness. This will help to identify any issues with the product and address them before launching it nationwide. Collecting feedback and response from the market is important at this stage to determine whether the product will generate negative cash flows or create a strong entry barrier in the market.
It is also important to determine whether the product is unique and offers something different from what competitors are offering. If the product is similar to what others are offering, it may be necessary to sell it at a discount to make it more attractive to customers.
In finding, developing a sustainable product for a business requires careful consideration of several factors, including technology, ecosystem, market analysis, and customer needs. It is important to conduct a pilot experiment and collect feedback from the market to ensure that the product is effective and meets the needs of the target market.
Pricing & Positioning
When it comes to launching a product, there are many things to consider in order to position it correctly in the market. The first step is to create a marketing campaign that will showcase your product and its unique features. You will also need to decide on your hook, which is the aspect of your product that will grab the customer's attention and make them want to buy it.
To further promote your product, you will need to create a jingle that will stick in the customer's mind and make them remember your brand. Your call to action is also an important part of the marketing campaign, as it will encourage the customer to take action and purchase your product.
Once your marketing campaign is in place, you will need to develop a turnover strategy and revenue strategy to ensure that your business is profitable. You will also need to determine how you will create lifetime value for your customers, which involves retaining them for the long term and generating recurring revenue.
Deciding how you will position your product in the market is also crucial. You will need to determine whether you will sell your product on a freemium model, and how you will penetrate the market. You will also need to consider how you will bring your brand promise to life, and how you will upsell and cross-sell to your customers.
Creating brand loyalty is another important aspect of positioning your product, and you will need to determine how you will increase brand equity and do cross-promotion. Guerrilla marketing can also be an effective way to promote your product, and you will need to consider how you can incorporate it into your marketing strategy.
All of these elements come under marketing and positioning, and will help you to sell your product in the 5th P. It is important to note that if you sell a product that everyone else is selling, then you will face competition and struggle to stand out from the crowd.
However, if you create a unique product, you will benefit from a low cost of customer acquisition, recurring revenue, and easy upsell/cross-sell opportunities. By differentiating yourself from the competition, you can create a product that is the newest, niche, most needed, best, expert, most convenient, coolest, best quality, aspiring, precise problem solver, unique, adventurous, cheapest, innovative, maximum features, or genuine.
Once you have determined your pricing and positioning strategy, you can begin selling your product in the market. You should pay attention to customer feedback and respond to any negative feedback by revisiting your marketing and positioning strategy to ensure that you have solved the problem properly.
If you are facing challenges in selling your product, such as difficulty acquiring customers or high customer acquisition costs, it may be necessary to revisit your marketing strategy and start again from the beginning. You should only move on to the 6th P, expansion, when your 5th P (pricing and positioning) is working properly.
It is important to remember that scale can kill a business, and that you should not try to make your business big before it is ready. Instead, focus on establishing a solid foundation for your business, including your channel, product, pricing, and understanding of the customer's problem. Once you have done this, you can slowly begin to expand your business through advertising and other forms of promotion.
Process & Performance
The key to achieving process and performance excellence lies in obtaining the right feedback until the 5th P. Once you have done that, you can expect to see several positive outcomes. Firstly, your productivity will increase, and you will be able to handle a larger workload. Secondly, you can expand your operations by increasing your manpower, opening new branches, and creating new departments. Thirdly, you can bring in new distributors and retailers to help you reach a wider audience.
In addition, you may be able to convert previously loss-making ventures into profitable ones, become a fast-mover from a first-mover, and scale up your operations from a regional to a national level. You can increase the speed of execution, maximize your working hours between 8 am and 8 pm, and implement TRA/TRS execution frameworks to optimize your processes.
When all of these factors are working together seamlessly and efficiently, you can expect to launch and ramp up your commercialization efforts in the 6th P. Scaling up your distributor, channel partners, and supply chain becomes easier when you are doing something big, and the profits will start to come in once all the pieces fall into place.
Profit
When it comes to running a profitable business, there are several key things to keep in mind. First and foremost, you should always approach every decision with a cost-benefit analysis in mind. This means weighing the potential costs and benefits of each option before making a final decision.
Additionally, it's important to create a CEO's office and build a strong financial planning and analysis team. This team should include financial experts who can help you make projections and decisions about things like sales modes, tenders, distribution networks, market incentives, cost control, off-season sales, franchise models, and company listing options.
Once you have this team in place, it's important to take all feedback into account and use it to move forward with a final improvement cycle. This means identifying and correcting any mistakes or weaknesses in your business structure, and establishing a strong accountability structure to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.
By following these steps, you can move from simply maintaining your business to actively expanding it and increasing profits. Just remember that the outcome of your business (the 7th P) is directly tied to the success of the previous six Ps. So, it's essential to focus on getting those right before moving on to the next step.
Purpose
As a business owner, establishing the purpose of your business is crucial. Purpose can be described as the organizational belief or the aim that a business seeks to achieve. It is a guiding principle that directs all business activities towards achieving a common goal.
Many famous personalities such as Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, Jack Ma, Baba Ram Dev, Bhagat Singh, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Baba Ram Rahim, and Swami Srila Pranbhupada have established some purpose in their lives. Some of them had a wrong purpose, while others had the right purpose. Even big dons and terrorists established a purpose for their actions. Therefore, it is important to establish a purpose that aligns with ethical and moral principles.
Repetition is necessary to drive the point back home. Repetition is the mother of skilling. It helps to reinforce the message and ensures that it is deeply ingrained in your mind. The main point is about the sequence. If you are making any mistake, it means you are out of the sequence. You need to identify where you are lacking and question yourself which "P" you are weak in.
It's important not to keep changing your selling methods again and again. Instead, identify the problem and change your product accordingly. This will help you avoid facing problems in the future. All businesses that have become big have been able to do so by following the sequence of 8Ps. On the other hand, businesses that have collapsed are due to the fact that they have not followed the sequence.
This is the 7Ps framework whose essence is the 8th P, which is Purpose. Whenever you face challenges, go back to the sequence and rectify the missing P of the framework. Ensure that you follow the same sequence, and you will definitely grow your business. So, remember to establish a clear purpose, follow the sequence of the 8Ps, and stay focused on achieving your goals.