Innovation in the era of the digital revolution often seems out of reach for service-based companies. Clients commonly ask me; “How can we possibly compete in the expanding world of AI?” They fear they can’t keep up or afford to innovate as fast as the world’s leading companies. The hard truth is, they can’t. The good news is, they don’t need to compete with the Fortune 100s to reach their business and personal ambitions. Often, they already have everything they need to innovate by leveraging their current business assets.
Here are a few ways you can leverage existing skills and assets in different ways to create new opportunities for value creation and growth.
- Identify Your Underutilized Resources – Sometimes assets are underutilized because they are not viewed as assets, but as overhead. A commercial mezzanine lending company had seven CPAs on the payroll. Each CPA was valuable in their own way, yet none of them were being utilized 100% of the time. The company began offering CPA services to its clients, resulting in a new revenue stream while also providing a key resource to valued clients.
- Develop an Elastic View – Instead of defining your company by what it does (the products it sells or the services it offers), think of it in terms of what it knows and what it owns. Oftentimes, a company has valuable industry data or customer insights that can be leveraged to invent a new offer. An estate planning firm specializing in creating complicated trust structures for high-net-worth clients knew that 58% of prospects never completed their estate plan because the topic was complex and involved having difficult conversations with loved ones – conversations they would prefer to avoid. Knowing this, the estate planning firm launched a family consulting and mediation offer. This new offer created a new revenue stream and has increased the firm’s client close rate on estate plans from 42% to 87% in two years.
- Expand Your Boundaries – While there are benefits to having a market sector niche, explore ways to stretch beyond your current service category into an adjacent sector or an entirely new one. Your competition is likely doing this. For example, I know of a national marketing agency that positions itself as a healthcare agency, yet only 45% of its current revenue comes from that sector. The agency positions itself in this manner to grow its identity in the rapidly growing industry, yet knows it needs to retain clients in other sectors to achieve its revenue and profitability goals.
- Find New Uses for Existing Resources – Let’s talk about a chair. A chair is only a chair if you are sitting in it. If you stand on it, it becomes a stool. If you put a plant on it, it becomes a plant stand – are you following me? An innovative way a marketing agency survived the 2008 downturn was to market its account managers as fractional marketing directors. Companies who were leery about affording a full-service marketing firm felt comfortable hiring a fractional marketing director. In this case, the agency was offering the same marketing leadership services under a different label. This strategy was so successful the firm expanded the strategy and began offering fractional CMO and fractional marketing assistant services.