What a few months!

I haven't written anything for a while now mainly because I've been busy with the direction of the company. Since I last wrote, we have drastically changed our business model. It took us a few months to get to our current position but I'm glad we're here. At the time, we thought our original way of doing things was the best and the only way to proceed with business. However, after talking to lots of different stakeholders, including potential customers and vendors, our intended service was deemed too complex for the vendors we were servicing. The market needs to mature for a few years before we proceed with our original idea.

So, I guess the lesson to learn is know when you are beaten and change before investing too much time and money. The changes mean that marketing material, stationery, market research conducted, etc... has become somewhat redundant. The sooner you can recognise when a change a is needed in your business the better. If a business plan is based on good research, meaning talking to potential customers face to face, looking at the current market conditions, the occurrence of major changes will be kept to a minimum.

In all honesty, I think we made the mistake of thinking we could turn our great idea into a great service and all potential customers would come running. In short, our intended service had far too many complications that would put off potential customers. Also, we did not talk to customers enough. We relied on only the personal contacts we have rather than entering into dialogue with the wider community. I think we were scared to talk customers because, in the back of our minds, we knew they would be negative about what we had to offer. We wanted to develop a fully functional service before talking to them about it. Obviously this is very risky.

I'm glad to say that what we have now is much more viable, with much less risk, and the chance of quicker returns.