Plan marketplace disruptions that favor your business

Adam Hartung thinks you should plan for some marketplace disruptions - with you, not the economy, doing the disrupting.

Hartung isn't advocating anything radical, except in the we've-always-done-business-this-way sense; and although "disruption" may be a dangerous-seeming word, the marketplace disruptions Hartung wants us to think about aren't frightening.

Think creatively. Think marketplace shift. Think winning.

Put a tad differently, Hartung suggests that your business should be the one that shifts the marketplace in a manner that takes competitors by surprise and puts them on the defensive.

Hartung, managing partner of Spark Partners, a Long Grove consulting firm, says causing the marketplace to shift in your favor "Intellectually isn't hard to do." Pulling it off, however, may require a mental return to the days "early in the typical small business' life cycle when they'd try anything" to succeed.

Take a day care center, for example:

A disruption, Hartung explains, can be as simple as "what happens to a day care center where people drop off their kids every day - until a competitor starts picking the kids up at home."

For the day care center with the traditional you-bring-the-kids-here approach, the new center with a minivan and logo that picks kids up and takes them back home has fostered a marketplace disruption.

That's the type of creative disruption Hartung advocates. It's an approach many entrepreneurs embrace in their early days: Look at the marketplace. Determine what needs exist. Fill them.

"We need to be willing to make changes, but instead we tend to obsess about execution," Hartung says. The focus on execution is the result, he says, of years of authors and advisors stressing the need to build and execute a business strategy.

"Most business books are about improving execution," Hartung states - all well and good until the marketplace shifts and businesses "inevitably react by trying to improve execution.

"When we focus on execution, we become obsessed with price. Pretty soon, everyone has the same business model, and the only difference is price." The goal, Hartung suggests, should be to "Change the business model, compete on something else."

Hartung has spent the last 14 years analyzing what makes successful businesses successful. The ones most likely to flourish, his research indicates, "are in front of the shifts." That brings us back to Hartung's call to cause shifts - create disruptions - that force others to worry and, generally, scramble to react.

"Take two hours a week - take half a day a month - and focus on future trends," Hartung says. "Get obsessive about the competition. Analyze the competition."

When you "get into the rhythm," Hartung says, "it becomes very easy to make the market shift. You create success by getting used to doing it. You always get new ideas."

Questions, comments to Jim Kendall, JKendall@121MarketingResources.com.

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