To succeed in business presently, you need to be flexible and have good planning and organizational skills, experts say. Starting a business requires analytical thinking, determined organization, and detailed record-keeping. It’s significant to be aware of your competition and either appropriate or enhance upon their successful tactics. You’ll almost certainly end up working harder for yourself than you would for someone else, so prepare to make sacrifices in your personal life when organizing your business. Providing good service to your customers is crucial to gaining their loyalty and retaining their business.
Common Core of Unity
Successful diversification by acquisition, like all successful diversification, requires a common core of unity. The two businesses must have in common either markets or technology; through occasionally a comparable production process has also provided sufficient unity of experience and expertise, as well as a common language, to bring companies together. With-out such a core of unity, diversification, especially by acquisition, never works; financial ties alone are insufficient.
One example is a big French company that has been built by acquiring producers of all kinds of luxury goods: champagne and high-fashion designers, very expensive watches and perfumes and handmade shoes. It looks like the worst kind of conglomerate. The products have seemingly nothing in common. But all of them are being bought by customers for the same reason, which, of course, is not utility or price. Instead, people buy them because they are “status.” What all the acquisitions of this successful acquirer have in common is their customers’ values. Champagne is being sold quite differently from high fashion. But it is being bought for much the same reason.
Respect for the Business and Its Values
No acquisition works unless the people in the acquiring company have respect for the product, the markets, and the customers of the company they acquire. Though many large pharmaceutical companies have acquired cosmetic firms, none has made a great success of it. Pharmacologists and biochemists are “serious” people concerned with health and disease. By the same token, few of the big television networks and other entertainment companies have made a go of the book publishers they bought. Books are not “media,” and neither book buyers nor authors – a book publisher’s two customer – bear any resemblance to what the Nielsen rating means by “audience.” Sooner or later, usually sooner, a business requires a decision. People who do not respect or feel comfortable with the business, its products, and its users invariably make the wrong decision.