The photograph is my son Allen climbing the BCMC trail on the mountains of North Vancouver, BC. Allen is goofing around in this picture and it wasn’t long ago that either climbing the steep trail or lifting the log he is holding were insurmountable challenges for Allen. My children are an inspiration to me as I watch them be challenged and then rise above the challenge to achieve personal growth.
Changes in technology, people, demographics, and markets provide challenges and opportunities. For example, a friend reminded me of what it was like to go skiing when ski hills had incredibly slow two person chair lifts. Then along came four person detachable high speed chair lifts. Ski hills that embraced the new technology could not only take many more people up the hill every hour, they had a strong competitive market advantage over those that stuck with the old chair lift technology.
We often need to look at familiar things in new ways in order to create a paradigm shift in our thinking. In the photo above, the two people fishing are in water up to their knees. The photo was taken from a sailboat that draws six feet (two meters). The shift is knowing that there is a channel dredged out of the shallows that made it safe for our sailboat to pass.
Businesses come in all shapes and sizes. Their marketing plans are similarly diverse and the sophistication of plan often has no relation to the size of the company or the markets they serve. There are certain marketing fundamentals that apply no matter what your business or your target markets and prospects. While we need to paint a vision for our prospects, maybe they do want to sail into the sunset, we also need to focus on those fundamentals that will let us communicate our vision.
I wrote in my last blog post Vision, Goals, and Actions about how critical it is to take a time out, create a vision for your company, and then plan the five year, one year, and next quarter plans, complete with measurable key productivity indicators. This post is about those key productivity indicators.