Welcome to Take an Aspirin, the Business Leaders' newsletter from Aspirin Business Solutions! This monthly release contains our best practices, tools, and advice to help build strong businesses, motivated teams, and confident leaders.
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In this Newsletter:
Strong Businesses - How to Beat your Competitors
What's the point in spending lots of money, time, and effort on social media, marketing, and sales scripts if you don't know your Sustainable Competitive Advantage? (SCA)
In our Leadership Gym this month, our members looked at their SCA, which defines how they will in their market against their competitors. Its a core component of the strategic planning process and is tied to your vision. For example, our SCA is "We will win by helping leaders feel more capable and confident of achieving their business and personal goals."
Consider the difference our SCA makes to our business and marketing strategies, to the shared goals for our team and, crucially, in our delivery to clients.
Quick Guide to define your Sustainable Competitive Advantage:
Mind map your Key Success Factors & score them (1 - 10, where 10 is high) for:
a) What value do your customers place on these?
b) Your current ability to beat your competitors on these factors
c) The impact improving them will have on your business & team (inc. you)
Then, add up A and C. The highest scorers are your Competitive Advantage.
Draft your SCA - "We will win by..."
The goal is for you to define your SCA, then use it to refocus your business and marketing strategies, to align your teams around a common goal, and win!
Examples of Key Success Factors include high quality products, exceptional customer service, patented technology, low-cost production techniques, strong brand recognition, and more. The key is to find an SCA that works for your unique business and that aligns with your overall strategy and goals.
Our Leadership Gym members worked as a group to develop SCA's for their own business to help them beat their competition. The peer support, backed by our examples and advice, really helped create more powerful results.
Once you've identified your SCA, it's important to communicate it clearly to your team, customers and stakeholders. Your SCA should be a guiding principle for everything you do, from product development to marketing to customer service. It should be the foundation of your business strategy and the reason why you get up in the morning.
Remember, your SCA is what sets you apart from the competition and gives you a sustainable advantage in the marketplace. It's your secret weapon, your unique selling proposition, and your ticket to success. So, take the time to identify your SCA, refine it, and use it to drive your business forward. With the right SCA in place, you can be confident that you'll stay ahead of the curve and continue to grow and thrive in today's competitive business environment.
Confident Leaders - Wow Stakeholders and Align your Team by Facilitating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage Workshop
Defining your Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) is critical to the success of any organization. It's what sets you apart from the competition and gives you a sustainable advantage in the marketplace. But how do you identify your SCA and align your team around it? The answer lies in facilitating an SCA workshop.
By involving your team in the process of defining your SCA, you give them a sense of contribution to the project, and therefore responsibility for its outcome. This helps gain their buy-in and commitment to making it a reality, leading to greater employee engagement and motivation, which improves performance and results. Moreover, having support from your team means the company's key stakeholders, including the owners/leadership team, will more clearly see the value of the exercise.
Here are some steps a leader can take to facilitate an SCA workshop with their team:
Introduce the concept of SCA: Begin by explaining what SCA is and why it's important for the success of the organization. Share examples of other companies' SCAs and how they have used them to gain a competitive advantage. Brainstorm Key Success Factors:
Ask your team to brainstorm a list of Key Success Factors (KSFs) that are important to the success of the organization. These could be anything from product quality to customer service to marketing.
Score the KSFs: Once you have a list of KSFs, ask your team to score them (from 1 - 10) based on their perceived importance to customers, the company's ability to beat competitors on these factors, and the impact that they will have on you and your team.
Identify the Competitive Advantage: Add up the scores for each KSF and identify the ones that have the highest scores. These are your organization's competitive advantages.
Draft the SCA: Based on the competitive advantages identified, ask your team to draft a statement that defines your organization's SCA. This statement should be clear, concise, and easy to understand. Start with "We will win by..."
Align the Team: Once the SCA has been drafted, discuss how it aligns with the organization's overall strategy and goals. Ask your team how they can use the SCA to guide their decision-making and actions.
Communicate the SCA: Finally, it's important to communicate the SCA to all stakeholders, including employees, customers, and partners. Make sure everyone understands the SCA and how it sets your organization apart from the competition.
Defining your SCA and facilitating an SCA workshop with your team is a crucial step in the strategic planning process. It can set you up for long-term success, help you focus on your customers' needs and preferences, and create a winning culture within your organization.
So, what are you waiting for?
Motivated Teams - Using Motivation to Empower your Sustainable Competitive Advantage Analysis
Motivational Maps are a powerful tool that will really empower your Sustainable Competitive Analysis. By identifying the exact blend of Motivators that drive your people on an individual and a team basis, it will enable you to more easily develop strategies that align perfectly with the things that motivate and engage your team. That way, everyone will be working together to achieve your common goal.
To get started, you'll need to conduct Motivational Map assessments for each of your team members. This will help you understand what motivates them and how they are currently feeling about their work. Once you have this information, you can begin to create an SCA that aligns with their motivations and aspirations.
For example, if you have team members who are motivated by making a difference (Searcher Motivator), you could create an SCA that focuses on social responsibility and sustainability as a means of attracting customers. This could involve implementing environmentally-friendly practices, supporting charitable initiatives in your community, or partnering with organizations that align with your values. If you have team members who are motivated by being original and innovative (Creator Motivator), you could create an SCA that focuses on developing new products or services that stand out in the market. This could involve encouraging brainstorming and ideation sessions, or providing opportunities for team members to showcase their creativity to improve or promote your products and services.
Once you have created your SCA, it's important to communicate it clearly to your team members and get their buy-in. You can use Motivational Maps to help you do this by showing each team member how their motivators align with the SCA and how they can contribute to achieving it.
Using Motivational Maps to create an SCA that aligns with your team's motivators is a powerful way to boost engagement and productivity. By understanding what drives your team members, you can create an SCA that inspires and motivates them towards achieving your common goal.
Take an Aspirin - Creating Confident Leaders
Due to popular demand, we've opened up a second Liberating Leadership Programme in April, and have just 3 places left!
"Before this programme, I was a bit a lost, as a leader without the tools. Now I, and my Management Team, have alignment, structure, and a framework. We’re singing off the same hymn sheet and have a process of what to, do that enables me to be more objective, specific and focused on getting the best from our people."
Dr Joshua Smith, Principal and Co-founder of Life Balance Chiropractic Centre
The programme is based on 25 years of research into the beliefs and behaviours of high-performing leaders of all kinds of organisations. The research discovered the shared beliefs and behaviours that create high-performance, and captured them into a framework of 4 Steps, 15 Skills and a ‘high-performance’ mindset, that has courtesy, respect and high expectations at its core. Supported by 4 diagnostics to compare your own leadership beliefs and behaviours to the research, this programme is delivered over six weekly, 2.5-hour online workshops. Not only does it fit more easily into busy schedules, and enable remote leaders to learn together, it provides time between each workshop to embed new knowledge and implement what’s been learned. We believe in providing high-quality development at affordable prices, so click here for more information! P.S. We also offer a fast-track option for 1-2 people who just can’t wait to get going! Just enquire now via the link above.
Thank you for reading, and we’ll see you next month!
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