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safesplash blog

Sunday, March 20, 2016 by Matt Lane

5 Indicators That Your Business is Leading

Entrepreneur_computer_with_graph.jpgEarly in my career, I was told that sales is a game where it is easy to keep score.  There is no hiding…the customer either buys or doesn’t buy.  While this is true in sales, it is a bit harder to know where you stand with respect to competition as you are running a business from a general management perspective, especially in industries where there is imperfect information. After serving our customers and taking care of our employees, our priority at SafeSplash is to lead the industry and innovate.  Since our inception we have been the driver behind many industry innovations such as centralized back office operations for our franchisees, flex scheduling, innovative marketing tactics, capital efficient investment models, etc.

Here are some of the key indicators that we use to validate we are the leaders in the industry:

  1. Imitation by our competition: One of the biggest indicators of leadership is whether the competition is working hard to imitate our marketing strategies and tactics.  Afterall, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  There is nothing that makes us happier than a competitor replicating a program that we’ve had in place for years.
  2. Market share growth: If your numbers are growing greater than CPI, you know you are taking market share from someone.
  3. Customer defections from the competition: We love to hear customers come to our door, register for our services and say they have been a customer of a competitor but want to give us a try because they heard we were the best.  What makes it better is when customers proactively list our differentiators as reasons why they want to join our schools.
  4. When did we last introduce an innovation to the industry? We expect ourselves to introduce an industry innovation every 6-12 months.  If we aren’t innovating, we are following.
  5. Are we hiring the best and brightest?  The team is the company and the company is the team.  By definition, if we hire the best and brightest in the industry, we lead.

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