Sources d'avantages pour l'entrepreneur

Build your success by planning the best strategy, understanding the importance of finding and using many good, individual tactics: Your strategy includes having a definite purpose, to ultimately beat the market realities. There are certain bases -- common denominators -- for all companies that operate in your markets like: customers' needs, suppliers' accommodations and your being prepared for potential entrants. While you prepare to have a competitive advantage, each of these others try to demand and command attention in furtherance of their own causes. Anticipating these can work towards reducing the gap between the capital investment and returns they yield (profits/losses). It is prudent to manage these denominators in a way that reverses the trend of outflow (costs of start-up) toward desired returns, in a healthy multiple of capital investment.

Ask for "your" quantity price-break, as a particular tactic: you must have good credit and pay early to get billed for the skid price for your purchase of a carton or case or two (ordering less than a full skid), and pay carton/case price when boxes or packages are ordered (buying a broken carton/case), get the box/package price when you purchase less than a box/package (a "broken" dealer package), and get free delivery on a certain day each week to your location for less than their stated minimum order, etc. Competitors status in not receiving such upgrades may depend on their past, credit, slow pay, being in arrears.

dentify each such tactic as one source of advantage and exploit them one and all: There are many sources of advantage for an entrepreneur -- two of the most important being your location and special capability, such as equipment, patents, contracts, dealer or agent territories. Now these are scarce commodities and any strategic plan conceived to take advantage of such scarcity positions your organization along with the best of the competition, ahead of the rest, making success less based on chance and that much less complicated.

Position the organization appropriately: Focus on the markets and the marketing factors that synch with the nature, culture, size and technological advantages and constraints. Determine and discriminate between the markets while allocating funds. The strategy should reflect a clear understanding of markets and should result in intelligent defining of the segments that could result in refined resource allocation. This should of course be preceded by microscopic market research at granular level to see direction of trends in those markets.

Do not follow the trends, but set one: Far too often it has been observed, that the strategies are woven around the existing market trends. This is considered a way of playing safe, but how safe it is, is the question. The word “trend” itself denotes a temporary existence and ease of replaceability (imminence of change). The strategy should be to peep into the future and identify what could be tomorrow’s trend. Identify and formulate the strategy accordingly, or better still plan a strategy that could make you a trend setter.

Base your team strategy on privileged insights into futures, not on past history: It is a common practice, to collect heaps of information on the history, do some arbitrary interpolation or extrapolation and then base team strategy on this data. This will no doubt allow your team to sustain past commitments without losses -- but if growth is your objective and market leadership the ultimate aim, you'll need to have an insight into the future. A glance into people’s pulse regarding what they have versus new things they would like to have -- gives a fairly accurate insight into

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