Putting On the Shoes of a Giant for More Profitable Customers in Your Business

In this amazing exercise, you will put on “the shoes of a giant” stepping out of the daily challenges of your business to create improvements for another. We will do this because for most, it is easier to solve someone else’s problems than our own; it also provides us a great opportunity to analyze the competition, a larger company, or a leader in our industry. Make this enjoyable with role-playing and brainstorming and you will be pleasantly surprised with the results it will produce for increasing profits in your business.

Gather background information about your giant, find information many times publicly available (press releases, industry reports) and that you can map to information in your own company.

Brainstorm twenty ideas on how this giant could improve its business, be brutal, except no limitations and write down every idea.

Using a significantly larger business provides numbers that will highlight small improvements in big ways, look for ways that improve the value of each customer for that business.

Take your top three ideas and substitute your numbers, observe how the numbers you used from the giant relate to yours, especially look at ratios of income to profits.

Prioritize these ideas (with your numbers) according to their value in accomplishing your business goals, this is the last thinking step.

Take a break now! Go workout or play golf, do something fun as a group that is away from the office – do not talk about this shoe wearing exercise, just enjoy yourself while your brains generate powerful relationships subconsciously.

After a great nights sleep, it is time for implementation. For each idea, list twenty ways you could implement it in your business, do not judge them just jot them down.

Sort out the top ideas as they pertain to your business goals and pick one for implementation. This is the easiest part because you have already developed a means for measurement in the previous exercises with the available statistics and their current values for your organization.

Develop your final implementation summary, state “we will do X, which will achieve Y, in the period Z.” Be specific and use the comparison statistics to measure change.
That is it, track your results for the period and move on to the next idea when done with this one. Consider this exercise once a quarter as part of a retreat or half-day activity it will do wonders for your business. The key is to think like someone else without boundaries, determine the value of each element, and then convey them into your business for implementation according to your goals. You deserve a break anyway, why not improve the business in the process.

Copyright © 2002 Justin Hitt, All rights reserved.