Business Core Strengths: Find Your Most Profitable Opportunities
Business core strengths help you focus on what your company does best and where you can create the most profit. However, growth can make that focus difficult.
New customers bring new requests. Product lines expand. Services get added. Before long, your company may spend time on work that no longer fits.
The Digital Game Plan helps business leaders take a fresh look at that problem. It starts with a simple exercise: SO vs. SO WHAT.
The process looks at your strengths, new opportunities and activities that may no longer deserve your attention. Most importantly, it asks a powerful question: Are you chasing more sales, or are you building a stronger and more profitable business?
Why Do Businesses Lose Focus on Their Core Strengths?
Businesses often lose focus because customers and new opportunities slowly pull them away from their business core strengths. A little change may seem harmless. Over time, though, those changes can create major distractions.
Damon Pistulka explains the challenge:
“When you’re growing, you can easily get pulled off track by a customer that wants you to do a little bit more this way, a little bit more that way.”
Eventually, a business can land in an area where it should not compete. As a result, profits can fall. Even worse, customers may not receive the company’s best work.
Start by asking a simple question:
What are we absolutely best at?
Look at the products, services and skills where your team shines. Next, consider where customers see the most value.
As Curt Anderson asks, “What are your superpowers? What are you absolutely best at? And how do you exploit those?”
Once you identify those strengths, make them easy for buyers to see. Your website should communicate what makes your company special today, not what the business looked like years ago.
In fact, Damon offers a simple website rule: “If it’s not a strength, don’t have it on your website.”
How Can Business Core Strengths Create Profitable Growth?
Business core strengths create profitable growth when you use them to find better opportunities instead of simply chasing more sales. Revenue alone does not tell the full story.
A product can generate sales and still drain your profits. Shipping costs, labor, extra processes and other expenses can quickly change the math.
Curt shares advice from his father that captures this idea perfectly:
“Don’t chase sales, chase profits.”
Therefore, review your products, services and customers through a profit lens. Which ones make the best use of your team, skills and resources? Which ones create unnecessary work without enough return?
Next, look for new opportunities around your strongest capabilities.
The Digital Game Plan uses the idea of Blue Ocean Strategy to help with this step. Instead of fighting competitors in a crowded market, look for ways to stand apart.
This applies even in industries that seem like commodities. A company may cut metal, bend steel, build circuit boards or assemble wire harnesses. Yet each business can still find meaningful separators.
Your story, expertise, buying experience, service or niche knowledge can all create business differentiation.
As a result, the goal isn’t simply to sell more. The goal is to find business growth opportunities that fit what you do best.
What Should Your Business Stop Doing?
Profitable growth also requires identifying the products, processes and activities that no longer create enough value. In the Digital Game Plan, these become the “SO WHAT” category.
Damon gives the simplest definition: “Those are things that your customers probably really don’t care about.”
However, the impact can go much deeper.
SO WHAT activities may include profit killers, time wasters and energy suckers. They can also include outdated processes or product lines that no longer fit the market.
In some cases, even a customer may no longer fit your business.
Those decisions can feel difficult. Yet strategic business planning isn’t only about deciding what to add. Sometimes, the best decision is deciding what to remove.
One company Damon works with dropped several product lines because they were no longer relevant in the market.
So, ask your team:
What would happen if we stopped doing this?
The answer may reveal capacity that you can redirect toward stronger products, better customers and more profitable opportunities.
Focus on What Matters Most
Your business core strengths should guide where you invest your time, energy and resources. Start with what you do best. Then, find opportunities that build on those strengths and remove activities that no longer serve the business or your customers.
The Digital Game Plan turns those conversations into a practical strategic planning process.
SO: What are your superpowers?
Opportunities: Where can those strengths create new value?
SO WHAT: What should you stop doing?
Growth does not always require doing more. Instead, your next breakthrough may come from doing more of what you do best and less of what doesn’t matter.
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Game On!
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