Business Mastery: Creating An Invincible Advantage

Business Mastery is learning to take advantage of the constant change and uncertainty we're all living with now. During the last two years many of us, especially small business owners, have faced enormous financial challenges, dealing with an epic lending crunch, high unemployment and mortgages turned upside down.

In today's tough environment, you need to be a gladiator. You've got to be ready to fight for your success. After all, how many people would willingly get into a game in which 50% of businesses die within the first year? Only the smartest, and the most strategic and adaptable will thrive.

Some business leaders are poised to innovate and grow their businesses exponentially, reaping the huge financial rewards that come with managing risk well. The question is: Will you be one of them?

How do you redefine the rules of your business in a way that adds more value and increases profit?

Whether you run a small business or a multinational, you need to focus on three things: innovation, adding value and timing.

Innovation means looking for a breakthrough in your product and being the first to deliver it. That breakthrough is often something really, really small; all it takes is a bunch of tiny improvements. But you can't stop there; you have to market those improvements. You can have the best product in the world, but if you don't know how to market it, no one's going to know why you're so much better than the other guy.

A few years ago MySpace was the driving force on the Web. They looked so big that nothing could possibly compete with them. They were sold for half a billion dollars when they only had 60,000 users. Then two significant shifts happened: MySpace stopped innovating, and a Harvard undergrad created Facebook.

As MySpace did the same thing over and over again, Facebook kept making little changes, little improvements. Facebook focused on functionality, and offered a unique display of status updates, links, pictures and video posts. They kept users engaged with games, quizzes, puzzles and more as they continued to add features and innovations for their young base of users. In short, they continually innovated, and because they continually innovated they won the race. Now Facebook has 300+ million people. If Facebook were a country it would be the fifth largest nation on earth.

You've got to add more value to your customers than anyone else does. You need to do more than anyone else is doing as long as there is enough for you to sustain profitability and grow. The perceived value has to be by your customer. The more you are able to add value to your customer, the more you dominate the marketplace. You get wealthy by doing more than anyone else is doing.

Take a good look at where you stand in the marketplace. What's your brand? What do you really deliver in the eyes of your customers? James Dyson noticed that his home vacuum cleaner lost suction and kept getting clogged, so the industrial designer invented the Dual Cycle Vacuum Cleaner, which uses a different operating system. "We had to establish, beyond all question, that our machine overcame a problem that all other systems suffered from," Dyson says. He soon turned his vacuum cleaner into a status symbol, an object that people would pay top dollar to own. It became the best-selling upright model in America. Dyson created more than customers, he created raving fans. Think about what you feel when you hear "Microsoft". Now how about "Apple"? Apple's customers are passionate about their Macs (and iPods, iPhones and now iPads). They refuse to go back to a PC. Creating fans of your products is one of the best ways of creating lasting value.

You can be one of the best innovators in the industry and add tons of value to your customer, but if you're wrong about timing, you'll still fail. So timing is the last piece of the puzzle. Lots of businesspeople will say, "Well, I did all the right things!" Yes, but at the wrong time!

If you plant in the winter, it doesn't matter how hard you work. You just wasted all your time by doing the right thing at the wrong time. If you bought real estate in 2006 in California, you bought at the peak—at the overvalued time. There's no way you're going to get your money back, at least not for a long, long, long time. So yes, you did the right thing—buying a house—but at the wrong time. In order to do the right thing for your business at the right time, you've got to know what time it is and know the ramifications of that timing.

Convert that knowledge into a dollar value. How valuable would that be to your business?

Success is not an accident in any environment. Those who consistently succeed aren't just lucky.

Whatever you're trying to master there are laws or rules of the game that, if followed, will lead to consistent success time and time again. There are logical patterns of action and specific pathways to excellence that can be duplicated by modeling behaviors of those who have already achieved the results you desire. Individuals who achieve extraordinary levels of impact and success share a commitment to never rest until they discover these patterns and then take action to immediately utilize them.

It's like being a brilliant chess player. You don't get master the game by just reacting to your opponents moves. You excel by knowing all the moves in advance, knowing all of the options and their outcomes and how you'll handle them in advance. Great chess player process the game so rapidly because there are only so many patterns to recognize, and once you can spot them quickly winning comes naturally. This strategy will make you a killer in business, too.