Business Strategy Basics

It happens time and time again. You lay out the business strategy for the coming year, and it doesn't get executed as planned. Here's why.

Success of a company is based on keeping your business decisions and business strategy focused on one of three core value propositions for your customers. When choosing the activities that you pursue, they should always align with your core value proposition otherwise a firm will find itself losing its ability to maintain its core competitive advantage.

Keep it simple, stupid. It's good advice in life, and it's especially good advice for business owners.

The hardest decision entrepreneurs need to make is deciding what they will not do. Many entrepreneurs and businesses alike tend to spread themselves too thin and lose their core focus that originally made them successful. Knowing how focused you want and need to be can help you draw clearer boundary lines when it comes time to finding growth and expansion strategies for your business.

We all have loosely played around with the term strategy in our daily lives without identifying the key features that are implicitly addressed in our usage. My aim here is to isolate the key aspects of strategy as they pertain to starting and running a business.

Looking for good business strategy advice? Every so often a business reinvents an industry and turns the competitive landscape on its head. Do you have the potential to change the game in your industry? It sure beats playing by the existing rules against tough competitors.

We take a look at the corporate business strategies and what entrepreneurs can learn from strategies set by large corporations. Corporate strategies such as growth, stability and retrenchment are very relevant to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

We take a look at Blue Ocean Strategy, a strategic framework developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

This article evaluates entrepreneurs and businesses that were so disruptive, they changed an industry, removed an established leader, and have become a dominant force in their category because of their successful disruption.

Entrepreneurs can learn a great deal from the demise of some of the largest firms due in part to the emergence of new firms and new technologies. These disruptors have had a profound impact on some of the largest and most successful companies in the country.

Leave your competition in the dust by being adaptable to change. From new technologies, hiring techniques and marketing strategies, change can help you become more competitive. Here are six tips for becoming a cutting-edge entrepreneur.

One business will often inspire other ideas and offshoots can be profitable, it's a case of knowing which ones will work and which won't.

Got innovation? For an entrepreneur, it is not enough to offer the same products and services as the competition. Most entrepreneurs thrive on innovation and being one step ahead of the marketplace.

Effective goal setting is essential if you want to see your business strategies succeed. Many great business strategies fail simply because the company was not able to set goals properly.

It takes great courage to acknowledge failure. But when your business strategy isn't working, the best thing you can do is admit failure and take a fresh look at a new approach.

A would-be entrepreneur must always be on the lookout for entrepreneurship opportunities. Here, we discuss business strategies for entrepreneurs, how to maintain a successful business, and ways to help your business survive.

Are you making the most of your company's key stakeholders. Ignore them at your own peril. This is part two of a two-part series of articles addressing each of the most common stakeholders and how to maximize their satisfaction with the company.

Your business strategy is the road map that you and your company use to define the actions that you will take to create and sustain economic value for your firm. Not all successful companies have a great strategy, and many firms whom have had a great strategy failed. This article will evaluate how you should approach evaluating and defining your business strategy.

If your business is not showing the results that you want or expect to see, we suggest some ways you can turn the situation around.

Finding a durable competitive advantage can be one of the most difficult challenges for any business; however many businesses often try to compete on strategies that in fact are not true business strategies. Understanding what factors are excluded from business strategy will help you and your business avoid these same traps.

Most entrepreneurs are visionaries who can see point B often before they see point A. The future of the business is so clear to them that starting the business is a no brainer, but not knowing how to actually get to point B is an entrepreneur's double-edged sword.

Decision making is a business. Do you go left or right, up or down? The decisions you make, or don't make for your business, determine your success. In order to decide on a niche market, it means that you are foregoing other opportunities, or trade-offs, and knowing which trade-offs to make is critical as s business owner.

Some mistakes that entrepreneurs make are easily forgettable and are not critical to the long-term success of the firm, but other common mistakes that entrepreneurs make can have a profound impact on the success of the company.

Businesses fail every day. Can you learn anything from your dating experiences to help you be successful in business? Check our the six things you can learn from a pick-up artist that will help your business survive.

After deciding on the plan of action for the business the next thing is obviously to determine the manner in which those objectives will be attained. Doing so requires the adoption of an effective organizational strategy for success that will ideally cover all the plans of action required in achieving the set aims and goals.

Matters of convenience are paramount for the running of modern day businesses; simply put, convenience is an important societal demand that businesses must endeavor to offer. The entrepreneur who is likely to enjoy most success is the one who understands the importance of being at the right place at the right time.

The entrepreneurial sense that defines the nascent organization in its infancy might in some firms start to gradually grow dim as the organization begins to grow and enjoy success. The onus lies with the entrepreneur in as far as finding ways to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit is concerned as it is only by doing so that stagnancy can be avoided.