Carving out a space for a business has never been an easy task, and thanks to an expanding market, the task is only getting harder. Thousands of companies register each year in the UK alone, and those are often competing globally as well. While there’s no guaranteed formula, here are a few approaches that businesses have used in the past to find their niche.
Reinvent
There’s an old classic TV trope where characters will try a plan once, and then completely abandon it when it fails, even if it could still easily work. Old businesses could sometimes feel the same way, but there are more than a few plans that could be revisited and polished up to be successful.
Take the game of Plinko, for instance, which first debuted over 40 years ago as a game show side attraction. The online casino industry has recently taken the Plinko concept and given it new life, with people now playing modern versions like Plinko Go for real money along with the more familiar kinds of casino games like slots or roulette. There are even variants and twists on the original game proving popular.
Specialise
If invention or even reinvention wouldn’t be possible in your field of expertise, then the other option is to take something that’s already out there and improve upon it. There are a couple of approaches to this, and the first is to specialise in an idea, taking one particular aspect and focusing on it in extreme detail, often to the point of only working with one very specific thing.
The classic British example of this has to be chocolate maker Terry’s and their incredibly famous Chocolate Orange. Where most confectioners have a range of different products that vary wildly in shapes, flavours, and names, the Chocolate Orange and a handful of small variations have been this maker’s only products on the market for many decades and the approach serves them well.
Streamline
The other way to improve on an already established process is to simply make it quicker, easier, and more efficient. After all, if you can successfully strip away half of the steps in any process, you free up resources, reduce costs, and overall just make the whole thing more appealing, whether it’s internally at a business or as part of dealing with customers.
With time now being more of a precious resource in the modern world than ever, this is a popular approach. Great examples include things like the One-Click purchase option pioneered by Amazon, which cuts out a large chunk of the buying process, or essentially the entire Stripe system for online payments, which removes a great deal of hassle for merchants. Remember that the effect doesn’t even have to be that grand in scale: a business can be made out of improving just one tedious or annoying part of any important process.
As stated above, these aren’t necessarily a guarantee of success. However, these can hopefully provide a good starting point for any entrepreneur looking to make a mark on the business world.
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