Some might have said I was creative. Personally I detest the word – creative has negative connotations to me. Creative for creativity’s sake in a business sense is somewhere between stupid and suicidual.
Creativity without expectation of financial reward is cool. I have many friends who make the art they want to make and to hell with doing it profitably. I haven’t developed this skill, its on the shelf and I will revisit it again one day. When indulging myself is an option.
I might apply the innovator label to myself – trying to improve a business so that it is more profitable. But creative I am not.
You can always change the business you are in. Back when I first started my roof restorations company, the standard business model was, you sell a roof restoration, you move on to the next one. Sounds simple enough and if the business owner was ‘switched on’ there might be relationships with a re-guttering company, a leaf screen company and that was it.
You could then sell those too.
I tried my hand at this when I integrated the concept of water management. It went from “we sell roof restorations,” to “we help people catch, store and use the rain water that falls on their roof.”
I will tell you that in the early to mid 2000’s that wasn’t exactly a hot button. But it was an accurate reflection of what is going on. Water restrictions were in full force, the drought coming to its zenith here in Victoria.
The market wasn’t ready for it. Then the occupational health and safety laws changed and I went out of business.
All the same, the idea of innovating your business and in this case, how you present what you are selling is a valuable way to spend your time. I took the humble roof restoration, new guttering and water tanks and transformed it into a sustainable living concept.
With time I am sure I could have found a way to position what we did in a way the market found valuable.
From our side though, we had a way to massively increase the value of each customer. Simply by having more to sell to them. This is important because it meant we could spend more to acquire a lead if we had the same conversion rate as our competition. Just we didn’t know it at the time.
We also didn’t really have the systems in place to get those extra sales. Oh Well, you live and you learn.
New ideas are important but they do need to be implemented in a meaningful way.