The process of starting a new company almost always leads you to a different destination then you intended at the outset. I was just chatting with a friend about an idea for his business and I was reminded of a fantastic discussion around Judy’s Book from last year.
Judy’s Book is a local review site (somewhat like Yelp or Angie’s List). 6 months ago or so they had a slight change in direction and the CEO was very candid about their thought process internally that lead to the changes.
We asked ourselves the following questions:
- What are the hardest problems in our current business approach - the market issues that we keep struggling with over and over?
- What’s (surprisingly) easy about our business – the things that are working better than expected?
- Where’s the parade? What major trends are we trying to get in front of with our business?
Read the full post and the follow-ups: what’s been hard, and what’s been easy.
I really like this concept of discovering the “path of least resistance”. Listing what’s working and what’s not working is better than a SWOT analysis that usually gets me nowhere. Looking at a list of what’s working and what’s not in my business immediately gave me a basis to decide what action to take next (what to do more of, what to stop doing). Usually if I sit with my team’s like of Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats, we don’t know what to do with it after we’ve stared at it for 15 minutes.
Another question I ask these days to discover the “path of least resistance”, based on what Keith has shared with me is “What are customers in the market already paying for?” (Thanks, Keith!)
Useful stuff in this blog for any CEO.