You see, I have 2 teenagers, and they are typical teenagers. I wanted to challenge them to come up with a business idea. You know, instead of playing video games, watching Netflix, or chatting with their friends all day.
At the same time, you can't be everywhere at once as a business leader. So how do you focus on the business while ensuring that everyone working in the business has what they need? This is why a common challenge for small businesses is effectively managing workflow, especially as your business scales. The good news is that, when done right, it does pay off: marketing automation can bring more than 400% revenue increment.
Who wants to challenge the YouTube business model
More resources increase ability, efficiency, and quality. Unfortunately, access to many of these resources comes through having capital, but small businesses reported that a lack of capital or cash flow was their number one challenge.
For example, many business executives will push growth at all costs. But if you grow your company too quickly, you'll find yourself having to hire quickly, which directly feeds into the small business challenge of finding and hiring top-quality talent.
In addition, you may land a large client that makes you feel hopeful for the future, but it then becomes difficult to keep up with their needs. Because of this, a small business challenge is being able to scale and managing the side effects that come with scaling.
Obsessing over customer service, however, is worth the extra effort. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos puts it well in his 2016 letter to shareholders: "There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor-focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology-focused, you can be business model-focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality."
While these are just a few of the many business challenges facing small businesses every day, there are many others out there. Many of them can be planned for and mitigated with the proper planning and strategy.
Each generation of business leaders tends to believe that the challenges they face are more profound than those endured by previous generations. For the current generation of telecom leaders, this is stark reality, not merely perception.
By the time the pandemic hit, the telecom industry had been managing over a decade of disruptions, driving deteriorating economics (Exhibit 1). There has been customer-back disruption, in which digital-native companies like Uber and Netflix have set a new standard for seamless online experiences, forcing incumbents to redefine their interaction models. There has been business-model disruption, with technologies like AI, big data, and the Internet of Things redefining service-delivery and value-capture models. There has been new-entrant disruption, with increased competition among traditional players as well as nontraditional players, which have shifted value toward technology-focused parts of the value chain (for example, software-defined networking in a wide area network [SD-WAN], software as a service [SaaS], and over the top [OTT]).
The telco was no stranger to change, having just finished an ambitious three-year cost-out transformation that involved reducing operating expenses by more than 25 percent while investing in a new business-support-system (BSS) stack. But the landscape had shifted, with most opportunities requiring a full reset of the business and its underlying economic model, as well as speedier innovation.
We believe there are nine structural levers (Exhibit 3) with the potential to radically transform both business and operating models, catapulting telcos into their chosen future. Each representsa turning on its head of all that is familiar. In general, we advise that companies pull at least four to five of these levers simultaneously, beginning now and continuing over the following two to three years.
Other options for reimagining customer engagement are to build new businesses at scale or go to market with a radically simplified product offer. Today, operators generate an average of 10 to 15 percent of their revenues outside of core connectivity. There are a few exceptions, notably in the United States and Japan, following large M&As; generally, though, these ventures remain subscale and at challenging profitability levels. Going forward, operators will need to couple big bets with a clear reallocation of resources and management bandwidth while reinventing themselves across all parts of the business (for example, sales moving toward solution selling, operating model transitioning to a more digital-native agile model, emphasis on new capabilities with data and software developers at a premium). The focus will likely move more toward B2B, with edge computing, managed services, and broader ecosystem plays. By doubling down (both in terms of investment and operational change) on three such new businesses, a Southern European operator grew revenues by more than 20 percent.
Alternatively, a telco that chooses the ecosystem-provider and adjacencies archetype might create digital-native scaled CX, build new businesses at scale, decouple and deploy a greenfield IT stack, and deploy an enterprise-agile operating model. This approach could boost growth by two to three percentage points, NPS by 40 points, and employee engagement by 30 points. It could, based on our experience, increase speed to market tenfold and IT velocity by more than 50 percent.
This business challenge tasks students between ages 13 and 18 to apply science and technology to solve global issues, create a pitch, and build a business plan. Participants work in teams of two to five students to compete in four traditional categories and one special category that changes annually. The four traditional categories are:
For three-quarters of a century, DECA has been helping to prepare future entrepreneurs and leaders in marketing, finance, and hospitality. DECA has more than 3,000 high school chapters and 175,000 members. Throughout the year, DECA issues many challenges to its members, many of which are business focused and require participants to demonstrate specific skills and knowledge.
Young entrepreneurs are challenged to think of ways to make the world a better place to live by using business to implement change in this high school business competition. The competition is open to all high school students and requires them to submit a 1,075-word description of their business idea. Nearly $35,000 in prizes are awarded annually, including a $1,000 first prize.
I aim to keep this case study up-to-date for readers of the books and Smart Insights readers who may be interested. In it, we look at Amazon's background, revenue model, and sources for the latest business results.
The latest example of innovation in their business model is the launch of Amazon Go, a new kind of store with no checkout required. Boasting a "Just Walk Out Shopping experience",the Amazon Go app users enter the store, take the products they want, and go with no lines and no checkout.
More recently, there have been a range of business model innovations focussed on hardware and new services: Kindle e-readers, Fire Tablet, smartphone and TV, Echo (using the Alexa Artificial Intelligence voice-assistant), grocery delivery, Amazon Fashion and expansion to the business-oriented Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Prime, an annual membership program that includes unlimited free shipping and then involved diversification to a media service with access to unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes.
Recently, Amazon launched a broadside against legislation (the American Innovation and Online Choice Act, S. 2992, and similar proposal, H.R. 3816) that would empower the government to challenge a variety of anticompetitive self-preferencing behaviors by the dominant tech platforms. Distilled to its essence, Amazon claims the proposal unfairly targets the company, would force it to eliminate or degrade its popular Prime delivery service, and threaten penalties that would put at risk its core business model, its workers, and the small businesses who sell on its platform. 2ff7e9595c
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