Look inside your company
While you’re examining your market, don’t overlook your internal resources.
Consider the perspectives of your front-line employees. Because they often face customers directly, they can be valuable vehicles for customer feedback.
“Spending time with employees and the individuals on the front lines of what we do is a great resource to hear what’s happening in the marketplace,” Schore says. “As our employee base has grown, it’s harder to spend the same amount of time with the employees. We now have offices in 21 locations so it’s impossible to be in more than one place at a time.”
To compensate, if you can’t physically get in front of your employees, pick up the phone, shoot out an e-mail or set up group meetings when you do visit other locations to compound the feedback.
Schore asks employees what clients have been requesting to learn where needs lie. He also asks what they hear in terms of timing. If a customer needs a future product, for example, Schore wants to know when it is needed to help determine if Triton can meet needs when they arise.
Looking inside your company can also point back to market trends. You can’t always get information on revenue — especially by product line — from your competitors, but you can see which offerings are successful for you. So it’s important to monitor internal trends, as well.
Also, any time you acquire a company, you bring on a new group of experts and a set of different marketplace perspectives. For example, Triton acquired Dial Global, a large network radio player, in November 2007. After spending time with its management team and learning more about that segment of the industry, Schore recognized the growth potential there.
He began seeking another network radio company to bolster Triton’s position in the field, leading to the acquisition of Jones Media Group in June 2008. Ultimately, he merged the two additions to form Triton Radio Networks.
Talking with your employees is not only an avenue for their ideas; it’s also a way to stay aware of the everyday duties they face. That can reveal their capability for handling new opportunities you may pursue.
“It’s always a delicate balance of not wanting to push our company too hard and too fast with very ambitious and very specific growth goals, while at the same time always leading and innovating,” Schore says. “So our management team does a great job of collaborating on expectations to be forward thinking while managing the expectations of the current day-to-day needs of the business.”
The easiest way to maintain that balance is to separate your work force into day-to-day operations and teams tuned to the future.
“We have a team of people that’s just focused on that growth,” he says. “Their job is to look at trends, to look at new opportunities and different emerging technology. … It’s then their job to bubble up the parts that they think would add value to Triton.”
To help them define that value — and to keep their suggestions aligned with the overall direction of the company — Schore requires those employees to do their homework. That consists of three questions: Will it work? How will it work? And what is the revenue model?
“We have the courage to be entrepreneurial while we have the discipline to be good operators,” Schore says. “That’s the balance.”
