SSCG Seminar - Building a Successful Business: Key Demand Drivers, Trends and Best Practices by SSCG Consulting

BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS KEY DEMAND DRIVERS, TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES GUIDE Eugene Nizeyimana

CONTENTS IINTRODUCTION: START-UPS CHALLENGES 04 ENTREPRENEURIAL POTENTIAL AND READINESS 05 BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION 06 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND POTENTIAL ASSESSMENT 07 PRODUCT INNOVATION AND DEVELOPMENT 08 BUSINESS PLANNING (PB) 09 FORMALISING A BUSINESS IN THE UK 10 FINANCIAL PLANNING AND FUNDING (FP&F) 11 BUILD AND PROTECT BUSINESS BRAND CREDIBILITY 12 DEV ELOP GO TO MARKET (GTM) STRATEGY 13 ESTABLISH AN ECOSYSTEM AND NETWORKS 14 MANAGING GROWTH AND SCALE UP 15 RISKS EXPOSURE MANAGEMENT 16 FOSTERING AGILITY, RESILIENCE 17 BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION AND IMPROVEMENT 18 KEY TAKEAWAYS 19 SSCG STARTUP AND GROWTH SERVICES 20 CONTACT US 21

INTRODUCTION: START-UPS CHALLENGES It's a good time to be involved in the start-up scene. More funding available than ever before, capacity building support and content on how to start your own business are easily accessible, and communitydriven coworking and innovation hubs are popping up everywhere. Despite the rising popularity of entrepreneurship, starting up a venture and culture brings its own unique set of challenges and problems in a rapidly changing and complex global landscape that its leaders must overcome. These range from: • Startup culture • Personality: Hard work, sacrifice and patience • Emotional and wellness challenges • Diversity: Markets, culture products, people • Resource scarcity • Rapid consumer and market shift • New risk exposure and uncertainties • Time constraints • Shaping vision, goals and objecting setting • Technology advancement and innovation • Managing performance and expectations • Intercultural communication and ecosystem Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

STEPS TO SUCCESS

TURN YOUR IDEA INTO A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS ACCELERATE GROWTH AND PROFITABILITY

ENTREPRENEURIAL POTENTIAL & READINESS When it comes to turning your entrepreneurial ideas into a business reality. Establishing your potential and readiness will help to enhance the effectiveness and success. Understanding of the strength of the characteristics you already possess, as well as a bearing on the gaps for improvement, in order to aid in the development of a successful entrepreneurial journey and career. Some people are naturally predisposed to entrepreneurial success, due to personality characteristics which affect decision making processes, attitude towards achieving goals and able to remain optimistic during difficulties. Start asking yourself right questions to assess entrepreneurial capabilities and the opportunities. You must be brutally honest to establish clear foundation and the personality traits associated with entrepreneurial ability: • Why want to start a business? What kind of business? • What skills and expertise do you possess? • Individual’s intrinsic motivation, passion, aspiration, vision and ambitions? • Achievement striving, industriousness and creativity • Taking Control “Locus of control” • Levels of persistence and hardiness • Resource capability and capital availability • Type of lifestyle you wish to achieve? • Risk evaluation: Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Take a self test: https://www.psychometrictest.org.uk/entrepreneur-test/ Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

BUSINESS MODEL (BM) INNOVATION A business model (BM) provide a clear, concise way of picturing how a business will operates. A means of assessing the idea and translating the value proposition into the potential for rapid revenue growth and profitability. Often before product development to demonstrates the feasibility of the venture.

Value Network

Value Creation

For a business to build value and provide compelling customer experience and quality products at lower cost, need to commit to a next-generation operating model. A model that incorporates digital technologies and operations capabilities in an integrated, well-sequenced way to achieve step-change improvements in revenue, customer experience, and costs. Business model innovations that changes the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery channels is a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. New approaches to modelling must demonstrate how the business will: • Create value for customers (MVP) • Create and capture economic value, revenue opportunities and profitability • Integrate a model for the digital world • Deliver product and services quickly • Put customer experience at the core • Identify and allocate resources effectively

4Vs of a Business Model

Value Proposition

Value Capture

MARKET OPPORTUNITIES & POTENTIAL ASSESSMENT Many concepts and ideas fall short in implementation due to the absence of conviction, bias assumptions, over optimism, unintentional fuzzy thinking and mismatches in the understanding of the market environment and opportunities. Developing a concise understanding and to uncover insights of what it takes to succeed and thrive, understand strategic and financial impact of their decisions as well as the implementation risks is critical to a business.

Common approaches to assess market entry and growth potential:

Using a structured, quantitative and practical approaches, can help to assess the attractiveness of the market and industry, evaluate whether the opportunity is realistic using key demand drivers and relevant trends, the regulatory and competitive environment, as well as the tax, legal and labour aspects which could be critical in the evaluation of an industry.

•

• • •

• • • •

Michael Porter competitive analysis: Barriers to Entry, Supplier Power, Threat of Substitutes, Buyer Power and Degree of Rivalry. Identifying the industry life cycle trends: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Understanding the forces of demand and supply reshaping the industry and market. Assessing the market position, financials, the distinctiveness and other developments of a particular business in relation to the others from the same industry. Identifying the future trends and directions gives the business required knowledge to react and steer in the positive direction. SWOT Analysis: Risk exposure and breakdown.. Client segmentation and benchmarking Market survey and feedback – Fresh set of eyes to help pin point out missed problem, create advocates (Push/ask, feedback and improve)

PRODUCT INNOVATION & DEVELOPMENT It feels great to bring a product, concept or idea into life. Many start-ups rush into the development of an idea before truly understanding the requirements of a successful product and or validating the financial viability of the opportunity. Key demand factors: • Designing customer-centred solution • Understanding design thinking process • Focusing on simplicity and quality • Applying lean product development and principles • Outsourcing missing skills expertise from specialists • Assembling the right team • Adopting and integration of advance technologies • Developing right Go to Market pricing strategies • Cost containment throughout product development and delivery • Managing and control of product value chain • Implementing controls, checks and balance to reduce risks • Diversifying product portfolio

STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLANNING Developing a strong business plan is vital to the success of any start-up business. As part of business planning process, entrepreneurs must assess current processes, analyse data for trends and identify the areas of greatest opportunity and risks.. A business plan provide the direction or attract investors, can serve several different purposes. Developing a robust integrated plan include a detailed strategy around all aspects of the business: the issues Service or products, finance, sales and marketing, operations, supply chain, procurement, engineering, market analysis, organization and management structure, clarity on enterprise strategy and architecture. A market beating strategic plan should: • Tap a true source of advantage • Be granular about where to compete • Put the business ahead of trends • Rest on privileged insights • Embrace uncertainty • Not contaminated with bias assumptions or unintentional fuzzy thinking • Balance commitment and flexibility to transform

FORMALISING THE BUSINESS IN THE UK • • • • •

Enterprise formalization is mostly relevant for ‘opportunity entrepreneurs’. Survivalist often do not have the means, knowledge or ambition to formalise. Formal businesses benefits from enterprise formalisation in the sense that it reduces risk exposure and unfair competition by informal firms. Formalising enterprises gain access to finance, business development services and technologies and reduce their exposure to government fines. They can also participate in public biddings or act as suppliers or retailers of larger companies. Reducing the compliance costs of being formal (taxes, social security and labour protection) might be more important than reducing the cost of becoming formal (time and money required to register).

Various dimensions and step by step to formulise your business include: • Business trading name • Legal business structure • Registration and licensing with Companies House • Tax and VAT registration with HMRC • Banking and financial infrastructure • Compliance and licensing with regulatory bodies, legal framework: social security, industry and labour laws. • Legal protection: Trademarks, copyrights or patents • Corporate branding

FINANCIAL PLANNING & FUNDING (FP&F) Finance plays a vital role in every business strategic planning and decision making. Raising capital and managing finances effectively is critical to minimise risks, failure and ensure the success and sustainable growth. There are more funding available than ever before but inclusion and access still remains especially for minorities. Establishing resource requirement and sources of funding is key. Recommended sources of finance and capital: • Savings and Bootstrapping • Borrowing - Family and friends • Grants applications • Angel investors (PEs) and Venture Capital investors (VCs) • Crowdfunding • Startup incubator or accelerator • Early deposits, licensing or white-labelling agreement • Small business Bank Loan or line of credit Financial planning and management accounting for start-ups include: • Creating and analysing systems, processes, models and internal controls • Establishing and analysing short-term cash flow and forecasts • Anticipating scenarios about the company’s cash flow and financial projections • Implementing monthly, quarterly, and annual growth strategies Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

BUILD AND PROTECT BUSINESS BRAND CREDIBILITY Many businesses struggle to sell product and services and generate sustainable revenues because they don’t know how to position and present their products and services to attract and retain repeat clients. They don’t have market credibility to clients outside their circle of influence. Branding is a strategic presentation and positioning of a business, products and services to clients in the market place to boost credibility, attract new clients and sales. Some of the reasons why strong branding is important for Entrepreneurs or Businesses: • Boost credibility • Attract high-paying quality and prestigious clients • Create potential to charge higher fees and prices • Allow more business freedom • Helps to build a better and access to exclusive networks of people • Will get a business on a better and bigger deals • Secure stronger strategic partnerships In the current digital age, brand and reputation are not only among the most valuable intangible assets – they are also among the most fragile. Brand is the culmination of culture, vision, values, and identity, which when used consistently and religiously, can create fresh opportunities for individuals and businesses. Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

DEVELOP GO TO MARKET (GTM) STRATEGY How to profitably deliver products and services to customers has become a defining challenge for businesses today. Customers don’t just expect more, the expectations themselves also change quickly, radically shifting profits. Businesses also face an increasingly complex landscape of technologies, methodologies, and both regulatory and compliance pressures to ensure that new processes are standardised and traceable. Global distribution supply chains landscape is also transforming, creating new risks and areas of uncertainties. GTM is about utilising both inside and outside resources (e.g. sales force, channels and distributors), to deliver unique value proposition and experiences to customers to achieve competitive advantage: • • • • •

Use timely targeted messages to make customers, partners, and employees aware of the new value proposition. Integrated digital enabled processes and leaders Capture and analyse customer/client’s feedback Review sales trends and financial performance Deploy lean and agile processes to speed delivery to market

ESTABLISH AN ECOSYSTEM AND NETWORKS The face of the business continues to be redefined, which means emerging ecosystems of interconnected businesses are transforming how companies serve customers and fulfil market needs. Traditional businesses are facing an unprecedented threat to the way they operate. Thus getting the speed and scale necessary for a reinvention increasingly requires an ecosystem of external teams, partners, suppliers and customers. In practice, this means working with a mix of platform players, delivery specialists, and niche players. Develop a network of partners who can rapidly scale your ambition. Relationships in an ecosystem take many forms. Some are build in ecosystem flexibility of transactional and informal. Others are built on myriad structures, from joint ventures to mergers, exclusive and nonexclusive partnerships, and other arrangements. These are the relationships that businesses can call on to provide specific skills and capabilities quickly. Any effective ecosystem strategy depends on understanding where the value is. Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

Ecosystems have three defining characteristics: use network effects that give businesses a strategic scale advantage; integrate data that helps create value-added products and services, and superior experiences, for their customers. Ecosystems also present several clear benefits: lower customer acquisition costs, provide access to data and opportunities to monetise, enhance customer relationships and retention; provide valuation upsides and help maintain competitiveness. Common six distinctive ecosystem business models that improve profitability include: Four that increase the top line: the acquisition engine model, the platform model, the multi-business ownership model, and the data monetization model. Two that increase the bottom line: the asset/resource synergy model and the infrastructure and capability enabler model

MANAGING GROWTH AND SCALE UP All businesses go through lifecycles from starting to maturity. Each cycle presents its own sets of opportunities and challenges. To accelerate growth and scale up, businesses must achieve and establish common attributes of high growth businesses, include: • Establish market validated and scalable operating business model • Define and execute a robust market leading strategic growth plan • Prioritise profitable and importance opportunities to boost performance. • Saying “no” to clients they simply can't serve or poor business proposals • Harness innovative and entrepreneurial leadership • Break the cult of inform ways of doing things to build and manage team effectively by setting clear goals, expectations, protocols and culture • De-risk business operations: breakdown and minimise risk exposure • Re-design operation processes for efficiency and effectiveness • Establish digital enabled mature infrastructures and documented processes for prioritizing, periodic reporting and measure performance • Focus on establishing new sources of customer value to enhance product and service value (MPV) and new experience • Innovate and diversify product portfolio • Finding opportunities beyond their core customers, growth in mature markets and in new territories and segments • Boost Go to Market speed: Supply chain locations vs customers There are many diverse dimensions to accelerate growth: M&A, market diversification, partnerships, new offerings and value proposition. Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

ACHIEVING TOP AND BOTTOM LINE 15

RISKS EXPOSURE MANAGEMENT In a rapidly evolving global landscape, emerging risks are affecting businesses more than ever before. Businesses can both rise and fall with astonishing speed as new customer needs, solutions and delivery approaches are uncovered. To succeed in the current volatile and dynamic markets, businesses must adapt, learn, and find new solutions quickly to do more than just retain market position; thrive, whatever disruptions come their way. While there are many reasons to why businesses fails, ranging from owner's skills, shifting markets, inadequate capital to collapsing simply due to lack of customers. Start-ups and SMBs often begin their journey without a definitive culture, which often leads to internal challenges, conflicts, disappointments, and employee turnover. A great product, service or business can easily fail without a strong culture, clear business goals, and a proven delivery methods. The majority of small businesses fail within five years of starting up. Risk management need to get on the front foot and must be embedded within the culture of the business, with a management framework embraced by everyone. Businesses must define their vision and ambitions. Need to be more agile, quicker to react, and more effective. See risks as opportunities to deliver great customer experiences, optimise technologies to cut costs, improve quality and governance oversight, and build value. To remain relevant and competitive players in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marketplace, need to deliver products and services faster and better than competitors. To achieve this, they must build lean processes that responds quickly and effectively to customer needs. Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

FOSTERING AGILITY AND RESILIENCE HOW STARTUPS AND SMALL BUSINESSES CAN HARNESS AGILITY AND RESILIENCE TO MANAGE RISK EXPOSURE FOR GROWTH There are a few things to consider when driving improved agility and resilience throughout a business’s cultural and operational shift: •

• •

An effective strategy to foster an agile and resilient culture starts with making better understanding of market dynamics, business risks, exposure levels and defining deployable actions to be taken. Design in scope for risk and experimentation. Structure process to minimise risks. Avoid unqualified and poor proposals, ventures and clients Adapt planning cycles and deliverables to the needs of the business and changing trends. Monitor shifting market trends and factors for changes in business climate for realignment. Define contingency plan on how to respond to eventualities such as facing adversity and building resilience. Evolve the way risks are managed from ‘reactive’ to ‘offensive’. Build the understanding that resilience isn’t just being tough; are skills and behaviours that can be develop. Implement agile practices and foster resilience in all operations. Using historical marketing and sales data to determine and define informed business decisions, future strategies, reasonable goals and expectations Understand all element of scaling and consider how your technologies can tie into the broader ecosystem of technologies and platforms outside your business.

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION AND IMPROVEMENT Moving the business into the top income and performance quintile, or even improving within it, can be a challenge. Businesses have to embark on journeys to transform their operating models to thrive, enhance efficiency, value, performance and profitability. Leading approaches and capabilities to help make sustainable changes to drive the next-generation operating model transformation and improvement for consideration involve: • Assessing the maturity of the management system for innovation • Putting customers/client’s feedbacks at the core • Using advanced analytics and intelligence to support decision making • Making an honest objective assessment of talent and capabilities • Making incremental and continuous improvement as a culture • Increasing productivity gains • Scaling a transformative culture through a digital factory • Digitizing customer experience and enterprise wide operations • Introduce Intelligent process automation (IPA) to replace human tasks • Drive the next wave of process outsourcing/offshoring through Business process outsourcing (BPO) • Implement process redesign and streamlining for efficiency and waste reduction • Linking journeys to operations and value creation to deliver breakthrough solutions and customer experiences • Harness innovation and entrepreneurial culture to create next gen solutions Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

KEY TAKE AWAYS Businesses, entrepreneurs and leaders must: • • • • •

• • •

Adopt a holistic approach to managing risk to help create sustainable growth, achieve business goals, enhance innovation, build credibility and achieve business resilience. Ensure operating model innovation is at the forefront of the corporate agenda to align with market trends and factors. Reinvent by transforming beyond the core is critical: Value proposition, People, Processes, Technology Constantly find new ways to solve problems, increase productivity, and edge out competitors to stay current and profitable. Develop a clear view of where value is being created and destroyed as the basis strategic planning. Understand what the next sources of customer’s value and choices are, and how to link experience to operational improvements Adopt best-in-class practices to continually test their assumptions, processing new information more accurately and reacting to situations more quickly with increased oversight. Develop the ability to continually revolutionise and build upon pre-existing concepts to help produce a vast number of wining models and solutions. Adopt a holistic approach to managing risk to help create sustainable growth and analytics to identify valuable business opportunities.

SSCG STARTUP AND GROWTH SERVICES

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SSCG STARTUP AND GROWTH SERVICES If you have an idea or concept you wish to bring to market or grow it into a business. Whether youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a startup or on the track to growth. SSCG Team can support you to increase success.

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CONTACT US Interested in starting a new venture and idea? And/or looking to grow and scale existing Startup? Contact us to discuss your needs and identify how we can help.

Eugene Nizeyimana CEO SSCG Consulting E: Eugene.Nizeyimana@sscg-group.com T: + (44) 121 364 2000/ 7873150562 Business Seminar: Building a Successful Business @ 2019 SSCG Consulting. All rights reserved

Advisory | Consulting | Operation Corporate Outline SSCG Corporate Services Ltd. Trade name SSCG Consulting is an international UK based management professional firm registered in The UK and Wales under Company House number 100030395. SSCG member firms and its subsidiaries or affiliates, provide management consulting, advisory and operation professional services. SSCG name and logo are IP or trademarks of SSCG Group. Registered address: Colmore Building 20 Colmore Queensway Circus B4 6AT, Birmingham United Kingdom

SSCG Seminar - Building a Successful Business: Key Demand Drivers, Trends and Best Practices

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BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS KEY DEMAND DRIVERS, TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES GUIDE