Boost your company with Competitive Advantage

FIRST IN A SERIES: COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Competitive advantage is what makes an organization take off like the rocket in the photo you see here.

How do you rate your skill in identifying, strategizing and executing competitive advantage?

I’ve learned from decades of work with C-Suites, boards, and marketers that everyone misses key considerations.

Declining margins. Slowing growth. Inability to achieve profits and efficiencies promised to stakeholders. These are signs that a company needs to reevaluate competitive advantage. This post is the first in my series on competitive advantage, which also appears on my LinkedIn page and you can see comments from others there.

Competitive advantage has three criteria, and a process to jumpstart the ability to fuel the momentum of any organization.

THE BIG THREE: Competitive advantage is the ability to – repeatedly –

• Win a price that gives you the minimum margin you seek;

• Use a branded business model;

• Incorporate a flywheel in the branded model that creates immense value for consumers and stakeholders alike.

There’s a lot to unpack in these three components:

Pricing power requires many interrelated considerations, all weighted, strategized, and seeded years in advance of any “pay off.”

While many execs think concertedly about their business model, few realize what it takes to have a “branded” business model.

Conventional wisdom is that today, flywheels are tech driven. But their energy can come from any means of helping consumers/customers more easily fill several needs (functional and emotional) at ever-faster rates. And get this: The ever-faster rate comes from a branded business model, fueled by that which seeds pricing power!

JUMPSTART: To jumpstart an organization’s future advantage requires these components to be understood, embraced and integrated enterprise wide. Education and alignment are foundational for achieving future competitive advantage and they also are among the things missed by most execs.

Lack of understanding and alignment are quite visible in many organizations: Game changing opportunities overlooked, significant money spent on misguided initiatives, demoralized execs, costly departures. A reversal starts with the board directors, C-Suites and department/team leaders aligning on the same critical thinking and planning process needed to cast a strategic playbook, identifying, and leveraging the three components above along with who’s responsible for what by when. It's likely people in your organization are missing considerations that will impact future competitive advantage. After all, the pace of change is such that opportunists, disruptors and disintermediators —presumed to be years away —are arriving ahead of schedule. Best you do not wait to cast your future as you’d like it to be.

I work with an increasing number of companies on how to train executives in the complexity of competitive advantage. What are your current or future competitors learning from me that, if you don’t also know it, could disadvantage you? Take a look at https://lfands.com/offerings.