In today’s ever-changing business landscape, entrepreneurs are the most affected. That’s why staying focused and principled on your company’s goals is vital to remain profitable and competitive. While every business experiences unique challenges, there are distinctive strategies that entrepreneurs can use to mitigate risks and increase productivity and profitability.
According to Mikhail Kokorich, a physicist & entrepreneur, business owners, and company managers need to continuously learn, unlearn and relearn to lead and grow. Mikhail is the CEO and founder of Destinus, which develops high-speed aircraft—a hybrid between an airplane and a rocket. From his first company launch in 1996 to the present Destinus, Mikhail has noted five major strategies that have worked for him, and believes they can work for other entrepreneurs.
Table of Contents
1. Create a Plan
If you’re just starting, you have a big task of making your ideas a reality. Study the market and identify the current gaps that your business can fill. Plan how you will execute every step and create a realistic budget. If you own an existing business, Mikhail Kokorich recommends finding ways to grow and expand it. He suggests noting down the current challenges that inhibit business growth. Once you know where the problems are, you can begin creating a formal strategic plan that will fix them all. Mikhail also emphasizes stating your goals and explaining your expectations to your employees, so you can all work towards the same goal as a team.
2. Keep Your Competitors Closer
Keeping your competitors closer means studying the competition to remain relevant or on top. Start by identifying your competitors and the rival products or services they offer. If you’re offering the same product, find out what your competitors are doing differently. Don’t copy, warns Mikhail Kokorich. Copying won’t make your product stand out. It can ruin your business reputation. Instead, use their ideas to generate your own strategy.
3. Invest in Technology
Every business needs technology to operate efficiently. You can inject technology into communication, task management, invoicing, and other repetitive tasks. Mikhail Kokorich also suggests measuring your employee engagement level to determine productivity. You can use technology to assign individual tasks and team projects to make work easier and more manageable. Technology also allows you to automate processes like creating invoices, sending emails, and making payments.
4. Focus on Employee and Customer Retention
Your employees and customers are the backbone of your company. Without both, you may not be able to generate revenue. For this reason, you want to ensure that you pay attention to customer reviews and complaints and work on them. Ask your team to pinpoint some of the challenges they face in their duties and, together, create long-lasting solutions. According to Mikhail, hiring and firing can damage your business process and delay growth. Hiring new employees takes time, effort, and resources that you could have maximized for company goals.
5. Embrace Change
The business landscape keeps changing to accommodate current technology and other economic dynamics. For this reason, entrepreneurs need to be versatile and flexible to adjust to abrupt changes. That means equipping your employees with the same skills to avoid losing them during such transitions.