What’s Your Core Competency?

Every business has a core competency. It’s something that they should be experts at and do right every time. If you’re an architect, it’s producing building designs. If you’re an accountant, it’s applying tax law to client circumstances. If you own a retail shop, it’s providing what the customer needs at the right time, place, and amount. If you make pizzas, it’s all about efficient production and controlling food expenses.

If a business recognizes its core competency, it will be successful.  It will align its practices entirely to the benefit of the competency. It will become an expert in understanding the measurements that effect its competency.  And a successful business often has very few core competencies. Why? Because you can’t do everything perfectly, and, you can’t be everything to all people.

Small businesses usually have a problem in recognizing and practicing its core competency. This is especially true out of the gate where customers are scarce and businesses are desperate, willing to take on any job – big or small, wide or deep – even if it doesn’t fit into what they usually do. This distorts the brand, processes, information, and learning processes for the company. Where they can’t do just one thing right they get nothing right, and end up paying the consequences either in diminished reputation or inefficiency, and both will just as surely torpedo the company.

In my line of work, I like to look at tech stuff that usually isn’t the core competency of most businesses. Running servers. Processing email. Managing the risk of intrusion, malware, or breaches in confidentiality. Preparing data backups for systems failures. Telephony and voice services. Copiers. Remote access. System maintenance. Mobility and interconnectivity. These things aren’t core competency. Unless you’re a company that manages email for others, or, does phone systems, these things don’t matter. They distract time, energy, and resources from a businesses’ core competency.  In my line of work, I like to help my customers be successful by keeping them focused on what really matters – and not the utilities that support them.

What are you good at? What’s your competency? Or, your company’s competency? What are you doing right now that isn’t your competency? Subsequently, why are you paying attention to it? Now’s a good time to think about this. In an era of scarce opportunity and belt-tightening, now more than ever every business needs to thoroughly understand what it’s good at, and should learn to do it better, more efficiently, and more creatively than anybody else. That’s how we help our customers.

R

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