Make strength productive, one of the habits Peter Drucker said effective executives do, is one of the things a lot of managers and business owners understand but fail to live out.
And you can’t really blame yourselves for that.
That poor performer or that failed product launch really sticks out like a sore thumb. It makes you feel like you are a failure yourself. That is why you do everything in your power to improve it.
You spend more time working with them. You crunch in more hours to make the product better.
I know the feeling. I felt like that too. And I’ve done all those things as well.
But that strategy or approach to business rarely works. Ok, let me rephrase that.
A focus on improving weaknesses rarely leads to growth. At best, it leads to incremental improvement – a few percentage points up. Not the 5x, 10x or more types of growth that we often hear in the news.
Take the story of this Agricultural Startup called MNLGrowkits.
(Full disclaimer: I am one of the partners at MNLGrowkits).
Focusing on Strengths
The current CEO and Founder of MNLGrowkits, Carlo Sumaoang, started the company last February 2014. After a year and a half, he recruited me (together with other people) as partners and gave us shares for the company. This move divided the work of sales, marketing, events, research and development among us all instead of just work him.
Since I am in-charge of digital marketing, the results I can showcase are in this realm only. The timeframe used here as reference is before us joining (January 2016 to September 2016) and now (October 2016 to February 2017).
- Marketing reach increased 98% from 6,695 to 13,258.
- Average visits per month increased 522% from 588 to 3,658
- Monthly average orders increased 1,220% from 5 to 66.
- Average revenue per month increased 1,430% from 3,440 to 54,134 (website only)
- Brought in 50,317 additional revenue through ads
- Ad ROI currently at 170% from being unmeasurable before.
Apart from these results, the other aspect that might not be explicit here is while these improvements are great on their own, the most important result often gets neglected.
See, because our CEO delegated these tasks to people who are capable, it freed up his time to be able to work on more important aspects of the business and on only the things he can do as the CEO.
We were able to launch new products (duo kits and garden kit) and other projects. If he was still working on every aspect of the business, he could only have grown the company incrementally.
And that is the biggest benefit of focusing on strengths and not on weaknesses.
So, are you focusing on strengths, or relying on simply improving your weaknesses?
