Weigh requests against plans. You can be completely facing gridlock responding to every single opportunity that comes up. We’ve got a game plan that we execute, and that’s how we stay on track. We know what exactly we’d like to accomplish for the year. We’ve got a level of financial discipline to make sure that we pursue opportunities that can deliver profitable growth to the company, not just pursuing revenue for revenue’s sake. In other words, don’t respond to any opportunity just to get another couple of bucks of revenue in the business.
Make sure that you’re looking at every opportunity through a strategic lens. You’ve got to look specifically at: What are you trying to accomplish in the marketplace? How do we define success? What kind of growth targets are we looking at, and how does the market support those?
You need to ensure that you don’t let opportunistic revenue scenarios take you too far afield from your core strategy — not to say that you don’t look at and seize opportunity when it presents itself, but it’s got to be in the context of not only your strategy but your core competency as a company.
When we start a new opportunity, we look at the market size, the product fit. We evaluate our go-to-market strategy — in other words, how are we going to deliver the product to market, how is it going to be serviced and supported, what kind of investments are going to be required to evolve the product over time?
Some days you say to yourself, ‘Why are we not running after that revenue opportunity?’ You can always sell a couple of products to a couple of customers — a market that does not make. So we’re looking at the broader market opportunities. When you’re looking at scaling your business, you can’t have a lot of one-off solutions for a single customer. You’ve got to build your products with an eye toward the market so you can continue to grow and scale your business.
Research decisions. We don’t have infinite resources here. We’re always evaluating where to put the next incremental or marginal resource. While you might have a broad market opportunity, the momentum in those markets can help guide your resource allocation decisions.
The momentum of our business is typically defined by our sales results. So if we see particular strengths in one geography versus another, we’re more confident in investing in those. If we see a specific market that’s growing faster than another, it becomes somewhat of an easier decision to invest in those growth opportunities that have shown and proven that the value proposition is working.
Our greatest challenge is where to make those investments first and how to prioritize them. Sales results tend to be an excellent guide for that. You don’t double or triple down on a particular strategy until you see some results.
We have the operational systems in place that we can track revenue against those product categories. We have daily reviews of our sales results. … So if something is not achieving its targets, we know it very quickly.
How to reach: Equitrac Corp., (800) 327-0183 or www.equitrac.com
