How 1 Simple Innovation Strategy Will Grow Your Small Business [Template]

You may not believe this, but small businesses have a strategy advantage over larger businesses. They benefit from close contact with their customers, often interacting with them on a day-to-day basis. This customer intimacy allows a small business owner to quickly adjust their service to meet the needs of their customers, resulting in a loyal clientele. But often the very thing that makes a small business stand out in their customers’ minds is what prevents them from growing to reach more customers.

What a Harley Service Shop knows about their Customer

Take Joe, who owns a service business that helps Harley owners maintain and customize their bikes. Joe is deeply involved with every one of his customers. He knows the roads they like to ride and the experiences they enjoy. His clients know and trust Joe to keep them abreast of new ideas for their bikes and to advise them on what modifications to avoid. But there is only one Joe, and that is the crux of the issue.

Joe has a long wait list for his service and often has to turn people away because he doesn’t have time to help them. He has been asked to expand his operations to other areas in the region but he is already working ten hours a day, six days a week, so he can’t imagine how he could take on another service shop. Yet he would love to serve more customers, love to see more of his custom Harley's on the road.

He may not realize it but Joe has a very innovative small business strategy in the way he set up and runs his business. He thinks the demand for his service is because his customers like him but in fact, it is because of the unique service he provides. The key to unlocking growth for his business is discovering what makes him unique and why.

Discovering Your Customer’s Journey [Download Our Free Journey Map Template Here]

This is where Joe can use his customer knowledge to his advantage. In 5 Tips to Make Journey Mapping Work for Your Business, we outlined a way to discover what is most important to customers. This journey map captured each of the customer’s steps toward successful completion of their task, along with the highs and lows they encountered. The journey map is a small business owner’s first step to building a system that delivers their business’s unique value in a repeatable, scalable way.

As Joe creates a journey map for his business, he can look for the high points in their journey that he contributes to and the low points he alleviates. This starts to build a key value proposition that he delivers that is second nature for him. For example, he may help his customers with a classic look for their bikes that is not marred by trendy additions that don’t fit and are hard to maintain. This value proposition becomes the customer experience that is at the heart of every system Joe documents and builds as he enables his business to grow.

Capturing Innovation in your Unique Service Value

Often this exercise is very hard for a small business owner to apply to their own business. The way they do business is common sense for them but not for their employees. It may take an outside eye to observe their interaction with their customers. This is exactly where a small business owner can engage their employees to help them build the repeatable systems that their business needs to grow. If Joe has someone in mind to take over the day-to-day operations of his business or to start a new location, this employee’s first job should be interviewing their customers and building their journey maps (here is a great journey map template to use). Their second job should be to follow Joe around and document every customer interaction.

One caveat — it will take a “beginner’s mind” to observe the unique ways a business serves their customer. Long term employees may be just as challenged as the business owner to take that fresh view of the business. You may need to engage friends and family to help you take this first step to business growth. The added benefit of a beginner’s mind? This exercise could reconnect you to your roots, to those passionate first customers who inspired the launch of your business in the first place.

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