3 Ways Business Has Changed in the Past 3 Years

Lawrence Tepperman
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Running a business has changed more dramatically over the last three years than in any previous period, especially in terms of operations and how to connect with clients. But has the change made things easier or harder? As business leaders, we are all seeing long-established companies disrupted by digital start-ups and considering how our business should move forward to avoid the same fate — by not just competing, but winning, and continually learning to lead the change.

So, what do you need to know to get up the learning curve? At K2 Digital, we’re fortunate to work with many diverse companies, ensuring they become leaders and remain on top. I have witnessed a number of traits that each of these companys’ leadership teams have in common. They’re able to move fast, act nimbly, and act boldly in order to:

1. Deliver exceptional end-to-end (e2e) employee & customer experiences.

Customer experience focuses on the relationship between a business and its customers. That is, every interaction, no matter how brief, builds — or damages — customers’ relationships with your brand.

Today’s reality is that healthy businesses are in a constant state of transformation. Employees themselves must be part of that change. Their ability to learn and develop is one of the most critical factors to ensure future success. Engagement, empathy and skills development need to be the focus so that they can deliver the best possible service and product knowledge to your customers in ways that builds sustained growth.

How is this done?

  • Building a diverse and collaborative workplace. To successfully disrupt and remain competitive, enterprises need to generate the best ideas. Smart business leaders proactively look at diversity as their competitive advantage.
  • Creating an environment of constant learning.
  • Providing employees with engaging and modern tools.
  • Taking risks, and allowing employees to fail, albeit quickly!

2. Get to market with smart products and offerings, more efficiently.

The ability to capture and use customer insights is critically important if your company is to meet needs of customers and employees. The best companies use the data garnered by customer and employee experiences to anticipate what customers are thinking about, and developing products and solutions before customers have a chance ask for it.

How is this done?

  • Define the business objectives you’d like to achieve. Is it new customers? Increased wallet-size? Increased loyalty?
  • Start with good data. Clean, timely, and accurate data — both structured and unstructured. Select the right technology that will deliver relevant, high-precision data.
  • Tease out critical patterns from your data, such as customer-buying histories, behavioural data, even survey analysis to understand the typical path of your high value segments. As you examine your customers’ lifecycles, you will find gaps where you are leaking value.

3. Adopt innovative business models & optimize business operations for automation, simplicity, and pace.

When businesses shift from their traditional mode of operation and management to digitally oriented operation, they are transitioning to digital transformation.

How is this done?

  • Stop planning, start preparing. Planning is stalling, preparing means to expand or deepen the organization’s capabilities. The idea is to put less effort into being ‘right,’ and more into becoming less wrong over time.
  • Align your business objectives with IT. The first step of innovating business is to improve and automate processes throughout the entire organization.

The bottom line is that business leaders who are driving success today, and will continue to do so tomorrow start small, but think big. Companies that win know they don’t have to have the future all figured out. They don’t create multi-year roadmaps where all the thinking is done upfront and the doing is done afterward.

Instead, these companies have a big vision, know who and what they want to be, but are prepared to start small, and never stop thinking, tweaking, adjusting, learning, along the way to their big vision. This is not only far more cost-effective and agile in its closed-loop learning process, but also, far more effective, period. You may turn more often, but you will actually hit your target sooner, and for less money. This requires something that many organizations don’t possess: a true willingness — actually, a desire — to admit failure, learn, tweak, improve and keep going.

In only 3 years we have seen many organizations gracefully (and some not so gracefully) alter the course of the organization by delivering on the above 3 winning factors.

If you are interested in learning more about what makes K2 Digital different from any other technology strategy and execution shop, please feel free to contact me at ltepperman@k2digital.com.

I look forward to hearing from you.

About the Author:

Please do not hesitate to contact me at Lawrence.Tepperman@gmail.com or on LinkedIn

Lawrence Tepperman is a serial entrepreneur, having successfully grew and exited two startups, 80/20 Solutions and K2 Digital, and is now Proprietor & President of Berkeley Payment Solutions Inc.

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