Plan your trip
When Urban joined Grange, it was already a strong company, but he thought it could grow into much more. When you want to take on that challenge, you start by understanding what you can and can’t do already.
“You have to figure out what current skills and abilities your organization has,” he says. “Then you have to figure out if there’s a big gap between where you are and where you want to go and can you even close the gap.”
So he sat with his senior leadership team and board for a conversation about success.
“We spend a lot of time talking about what is success, how do we define it, what does it look like,” he says. “And that helps us then assess our current capabilities and skills and then you can do a very basic gap analysis: Here’s where we are, here’s where we need to be, how do you get from here to there, and for us, it’s really three things. We think about our mission statement, which is why we’re here. We think about our vision, which is that exciting view of the future, and then we think about the cultural aspects of our company that we want to preserve.”
Urban believes there is a three-step process to the assessment, starting with a sit-down meeting with your leadership team to plan your trip.
“Think about it like you’re going to plan a vacation,” he says. “The first thing you have to figure out is where you’re going to go, so we spend a lot of time saying what do we want to look like in five years, 10 years.”
When the trip’s planned, you need to do a critical success factor analysis, looking at what things have to be present in your industry for success.
“You take any industry and you can make a pretty long list of all the things that need to be present for a company to be successful in that industry,” Urban says. “I’ll use as an example the fast-food industry. You have to have a good menu, it has to be cheap, it’s got to be quick, you have to be at an easy to get in and out of location, you have to have a drive-through — you get the idea. So when you do that analysis for the insurance industry, let’s say there are 50 things that need to be present for you to be successful. Then we do an analysis to say, ‘All right, of those 50 things, which do we really have in good measure today, and which of the 50 don’t we have in good measure?’ And then you prioritize the ones you want to work on and that creates a work plan for getting your company to be in the game.”
During that process, identify anything your company excels at or specializes in, and that can be your calling card.
“Identify if there is something about your company that you can either build on that’s already there in part or you can create, something that makes you successful, something that makes you different from the competition and it’s something that’s hard to copy,” Urban says.
Your company can be successful without taking these steps, but you’ll never be the go-to person in the market.
“If you want to be a true outperform company, you need to have at least one sustainable competitive advantage, otherwise you’re just going to be kind of average,” he says. “So you go through that process and maybe the good news is you discover you’ve got something that you can build on and that leads you to being in a position where you can outperform.”
