Credibility in the marketplace
Business is changing at an incredible pace and we need to remain relevant and current in this fast changing world. The most important thing to question frequently relates to both ourselves and our business model being relevant to what our clients want and whether it delivers our services the way in the way clients want them delivered?
I often experience coaches who ignore all the great background and experience that has allowed them to become who they are and I see them leaping off into unknown waters e.g. health professionals trying to sell their coaching services into the corporate world, where they do not have credibility, instead of realising the health market has huge challenges and through their understanding and previous experience they have an enormous amount of value to add. At The Performance Solution we specialise in the corporate arena – why? because our Directors and coaches have been there and done it, we have held board level positions in multi-national organisations, we are credible!!! We are not credible in the world of dentistry, sport etc. Of course it is possible to cross into other areas and that’s hard work.
We will only remain credible if we keep learning, growing personally and providing services that engage and satisfy our clients, so much easier to build on what we already know and the network we already have. If we lose relevancy we will ultimately lose the credibility that we have today. So we must always be learning, evolving, innovating, getting better, improving, staying relevant and current in the market place. We need to be ‘fleet of foot’.
Kodak was once one of the world’s biggest companies before filing for bankruptcy in January 2012, Kodak was founded in 1889 by George Eastman. From its inception, Kodak dominated the global photography industry. As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the United States alone according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School. By 1988 Kodak employed over 145,000 workers worldwide. 1996 was the peak year for Kodak.
The company had over two thirds of global market share. Kodak’s revenues reached nearly $16 billion, its stock exceeded $90, and the company was worth over $31 billion. The Kodak brand was the fifth most valuable brand in the world. Kodak missed the boat on digital not once, but at least three times. Besides never capitalizing on the digital camera technology it helped create, Kodak also gravely misunderstood the new ways consumers wanted to interact with their photos, the technologies involved and the market forces surrounding them.
Our credibility is a result of our performance, not just our past performance but also our current performance and attitude towards our future performance. Too often we see Coaching and NLP businesses not remaining relevant, almost every week we hear of another coach going out of business or taking a job because they did not remain relevant, communicate with their clients, adjust their business models to suit our ever changing business environment. They focused on themselves and their own needs without researching the market and they paid the inevitable price.
