This week on “Mind Your Own Business”. Finding your sweet spot. I want to share a cool concept that I created to help my clients understand strategy more effectively and it’s called “the sweet spot”. It’s all about the effective allocation of your company’s resources in order to be able to create sustainable competitive advantage to achieve your financial goals and this sweet spot brings that all together.

You could probably go after loads and loads of different customers, you could be doing loads of different types of work but not all of the work that you do is the best work for you to do. Strategy is about making decisions on what you should focus on and what you shouldn’t and Steve Jobs said it best “Strategy is about figuring out what not to do.” and, therefore, if you don’t have a clearly defined strategy for your business you’re probably going to try and do everything and stretch yourself too thin.

Essentially, strategy is really about these three components. First of all, it’s about margin. There is no point in growing your business where you cannot make money. If you have products or you have specific services and you aren’t making good margin from those there’s probably very little point in doing it so margin is key. Next up is Volume. Yes, it’s great that you’re making good money on a particular type of product or a particular type of customer but is there enough of them to help you achieve your financial goals.

You need to make sure that there’s this overlay of enough volume. You need enough of a pond to be able to achieve your financial goals and then the final element is all about your capabilities. As a business you will be brilliant at some things and you will be mediocre at others and you’ll be terrible at other things. Now, your sweet spot is where you get right in the middle there. Where you find this perfect balance between the things that you make good money on the customers where you’re making good margin there’s enough volume in the pond that you are fishing in and where that ties in nicely with the capabilities of your company.

That sweet spot right there. Bang! That is what strategy is all about. And then once you’ve discovered this sweet spot it’s about doing everything  that you can to protect it. When you invest in infrastructure or technology you invest in infrastructure or technology that helps you serve that sweet  spot better than anybody else. If you’re going to hire people or reorganise your business’s structure it’s about organising the team in such a way that it serves that sweet spot even better/

Any decision should be filtered by “Does that protect or bring us closer to our sweet spot?”. So the big question for you is. What is your sweet spot? And are you paying enough attention to it? See you next time on “Mind Your Own Business”.

If you’re looking for more small business tips, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”

Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing these tactics.