8 Strategies for Expanding and Continually Reinventing Your Business

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8 Strategies for Expanding and Continually Reinventing Your Business

By Martin Zwilling | Inc Magazine | March 26, 2024

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Sometimes business owners are so focused on making change happen for customers that they forget that continually changing themselves and their company is equally important.   In his classic book Invent, Reinvent, Thrive, Lloyd E. Shefsky, entrepreneurship professor at the Kellogg School, highlights this message, and provides some expert insight on how new venture creators can apply the principles to their own careers and company. Some key recommendations from the author and Lloyd, based on authors own business mentoring insights: 

1. Relaunch using your enhanced core competency. Use that same technical and business expertise that served you well on this venture to find the next opportunity.
2. Ignore the voices of dissent again. Negative advice on an unknown is easy and safe to give, so every business owner hears it over and over. As a leader with some success, you had the confidence to prove them wrong once, so don’t lose your nerve and try to play it safe now. Proven problem solvers only get better with practice.
3. Listen and act on the ideas of others around you. Take advantage of the fact that you have surrounded yourself with key people who have good ideas, but may lack the skills or confidence to act on them.
4. Move to a higher platform. Many business owners get their first taste of success running their own consultancy or practice. A few are able to move to a higher platform, for example, a sole practitioner physician creating and running a much larger medical organization. That’s a type of reinvention that can give you a major advantage over competitors. 
5. Create a new skill set as times change. Smart business owners in any industry, like publishing, recognize the appearance of new technologies that threaten their survival, including digital publishing and print-on-demand. The best immerse themselves in these technologies, and invent new businesses, rather than fight in the old one to the death.
6. Seek out customer trends before they become an avalanche. Don’t stop doing the in-depth communication with customers that brought you initial success. Plan an annual set of customer sessions that you don’t delegate to subordinates. If customers don’t convince you to reinvent a part of your business each year, you probably aren’t listening.
7. Find mentors who have the skills you lack. Proactively seek out mentors who will tell you what you need to hear, rather than what you want to hear. Work on the new skills you acquire from your best relationships, and test incrementally what you have learned.
8. Expand your investment alternatives. If your business success so far is based on family and angel investors, perhaps it’s time to start working with institutional investors and external business partners. Their expectations and insights will broaden your view and may incent you to upgrade your strategy or reinvent a portion of your business.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Sometimes business owners are so focused on making change happen for customers that they forget that continually changing themselves and their company is equally important. 
2. Some key recommendations for expanding and reinventing continually are: relaunch using your enhanced core competency, Ignore the voices of dissent again, listen and act on the ideas of others around you, move to a higher platform, create a new skill set as times change, seek out customer trends before they become an avalanche, find mentors who have the skills you lack, and expand your investment alternatives.
3. Starting a new business is not a one-time transformation that qualifies you for long-term success. It is a lifestyle, like many others, that requires constant effort, to keep you ahead of the crowd in a rapidly changing business environment. Standing still is falling behind. What is your action plan to continually reinvent yourself and thrive?

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Topics:  Startups, Entrepreneurship, Mentorship