How to grow your business with Value Exchange
When running a business, leading a business or even working in one - there is always a constant challenge of competing priorities.
To help focus you and your team, there is one simple concept we see keep coming up - value exchange.
So what is value exchange?
Value exchange is the basis of good business. In its most basic sense it's the concept of barter - I'll trade you my tomatoes for your corn, with both parties only trading if they feel like they are getting at least an equal return.
There are three important steps in value exchange:
Intimately understanding what is valuable for your audience
While it may seem obvious, this requires talking to customers, which is not done enough (we are guilty of this too!) so you know exactly what their biggest relevant problem is and then how you are the best one to solve it.
Find the most effective and efficient way to create value
This lives and dies with every employee. Is everyone thinking about where they are spending their time, and how it is contributing to creating value for your audience each year, month, day and hour? And are there people/leaders who can step back from that to provide fresh perspective and remove roadblocks.
Make it as easy as possible for your audience to exchange/consume
Always have your audience in mind, and think about the path of least resistance for them to find, get, consume and enjoy your value - it's commonly easier said than done!
But, how do you know if the value you are creating is actually…valuable?
There is a critical process that underpins every step of this - feedback loops. There are lots of different ways to say this but our favourite is a variation on Eric Ries popular 'fail fast' from The Lean Startup, which is Mike DePrisco's 'learn fast'. Basically it means, how can we quickly test our hypothesis with real paying customers sooner, to learn and iterate into a scalable solution. There are three core principles that help this:
Start with a hypothesis, and then work out the quickest way to validate it
Set clear check-points to get the feedback and decide on next steps
Build in time to periodically review what has worked and what hasn't to continually improve the process
You can also read about our simple tips here to creating a survey to get the insights you can action, with market research.
So how does this create sustainable growth?
If you can follow this simple process, and build it into your business, you will gradually built growth momentum that your competitors can’t match. That, in a nutshell is sustainable growth.
Want to know more, or just have a coffee to discuss this and share your ideas? Get in touch, as coffee is on us!