Strong awareness will facilitate operational effectiveness and reward you one day when you sell your company
Ask yourself this question – how good is my team’s situational awareness of what is going on outside our four walls as it relates to what could be threat or opportunity for us?
Having solid external situational awareness is a key element to any strategic plan. Unless me and my team have solid situational awareness, I truly won’t know what brewing threats we may need to navigate and we may be missing opportunities that the market is presenting to us. Said another way, ask yourself could my business be disrupted and could my business play the role of a disrupter? If your answer is I’m not sure, then the root issue might be your external situational awareness has become stale.
Ask yourself these questions to get an idea of how good your situational awareness is with your business:
- Is investment capital flowing into your industry/market or is it outflowing? Investment arms such as venture capital and private equity flow into dynamic and compelling market opportunities and leave those where they believe there isn’t much upside.
- If money is flowing into your industry, do you know where it’s going and how it’s being applied that could indicate threat or opportunity for you?
- How is your competitive landscape changing – new players entering? Existing players expanding or changing their offering?
- If a new competitor emerged, what could they do that would make them a threat to your business? If there is something they could do, could you do it first?
- How are advancing technologies being applied in your industry? New technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, 3D/Additive Manufacturing, 5G (soon to move to 6G), Internet of Things, etc – will any of these change your customer requirements or change how your competitors support your customers?
- Have your customer needs or decision making criteria changed? What they needed from you just a year ago maybe evolving in some way, are you monitoring any changes?
- How is the labor market in your industry changing and how might these changes impact your access to the quantity and quality of labor you’ll need to scale your business? What are your competitors doing to attract and retain labor that you’re both fighting for?
- Your company most likely serves various market sectors/customer types, do you have good awareness on how each specifically is growing/shrinking and what these dynamics are projected to be in the years ahead so you position yourself optimally?
These are just a few questions that leadership teams should discuss on a frequent basis to maintain good external situational awareness. Any changes in these areas could be reason for disruption to your business or opportunities for you to make operational changes that could disrupt competitors. Being a disrupter in your industry could significantly raise your company worth when the day comes you want to exit.
