How to reinvent your business

Brian Basilico knew it was time to remake his company “when I stopped being able to pay myself.” Donna Zoellick knew a new direction was needed because “I wasn't getting enough clients to cover expenses.”

Both reinvented their small businesses this year, almost inadvertently following a three-step reinvention structure advocated by Rich Horwath, a Barrington Hills strategic planner.

Last year Basilico's Aurora-based B2b Interactive Marketing, Inc., was a website design company. Today, Basilico and B2b are the place to go to make business sense out of social media.

“I needed to reinvent my business,” Basilico says. “The (website) projects we did at the start of last year weren't there by the end of the year.” He picked social media as his new expertise because “I like social media. It fits my personality, and it was tied to what I had been doing.”

Did the reinvention work? “You have to be willing to adapt to changing times,” Basilico answers. “If I hadn't done this, I'd be in a deep pile of hurt.”

Rather than hurt, Basilico, a self-described networking junkie who goes to “four or five” networking groups a week, “has gotten a lot more work and built momentum for next year.” So accepted has Basilico become that he now gives paid social media presentations to business groups across the country.

Basilico made an almost lateral move. Zoellick, whose Carpentersville-based Global Sourcing Specialists, Inc., deals primarily with small to mid-size manufacturers where consulting budgets have pretty much disappeared, has made a bigger switch: Her new Best Home Cleaning Products is a retail product.

“I wasn't looking to start another company,” Zoellick says. “Then a girlfriend bought a bottle of (a cleaning product) at a show in Mesa (Ariz.). We tried it at her house in Carol Stream. She did the inside of a window. I did the outside. And you couldn't even see the glass.”

Zoellick, who still consults through Global Sourcing, jumped. She bought more, tested the product, and opened Best Home Cleaning in June a “good idea because of the product,” she says. “It's not something everyone else sells.”

That may be the key to reinvention. Horwath, president of the Strategic Thinking Institute, says underserved niches can work in the reinvention process.

Horwath's reinvention sequence has three steps. Owners of small and mid-size businesses must “understand the context,” he says essentially what's happening in the marketplace. “We must constantly re-evaluate who we are to customers.”

That's Step One. Next is looking for opportunities such as Basilico has found in social media services and Zoellick hopes she has found in cleaning supplies.

Then, Horwath says, reinvention becomes a variation on the old SWOT analysis, a matter of matching “internal company strengths and weaknesses against external opportunities and threats.”

Contact Jim Kendall at JKendall@121Marketing Resources.com.

© 2010 121 Marketing Resources, Inc.