Recognizing The Riches In Niches

Business transformation: Hazel confronts the difficult reality of product line reduction during a succession planning intervention that ultimately saved her company

Hazel’s screams become shrapnel in a fiscal war zone, ricocheting off pallets of dead inventory.

“You’re gutting my life’s work!” she roars, face flushed crimson, finger jabbing at our 90% product reduction list.

Hazel’s business, drowning in credit card debt, needed radical surgery. She sold us her business and has an earnout. As new owners, we made the hard decisions she would never have made.

What she called “brutal cuts,” we called oxygen for a suffocating enterprise.

 A CANCER THAT KILLS BUSINESSES

Hazel embodied a lethal delusion that plagues many businesses. It is the belief that more products = more success.

She needed Succession Planning Breakthrough #4: Recognize the Riches in the Niches.

We executed business CPR:

1. Amputated 362 products (90% reduction)

2. Shuttered an unprofitable retail store

3. Quadrupled investment in the product line we are focusing the business on going forward (the 40 remaining items)

We had successfully answered the question: What can we do better than any company in the world and be rewarded well?

Result? The niche became king. Profitability exploded 17X over the next two decades.

The business had punched through to Succession Planning Breakthrough #4: Recognize the Riches in the Niches!

 SOME LEADERS OFTEN DROWN IN DEAD RIVERS OF MEDIOCRITY

“A dead thing goes with the current, only a living thing can go against it.“- G. K. Chesterton

Hazel’s crisis mirrors:

• “Good” products cannibalizing “great” potential

• Activity masquerading as achievement

We helped Hazel:

• Identify her Impact Niche

• Implement Profit Purification

 THE 3-EYES NICHE IDENTIFIER

Drowning in debt, Hazel needed to view the business with new eyes:

1. Impact eyes: “If we vanished tomorrow, who would care the most?”

2. Profit eyes: “What fuels 80% of margins?”

3. Legacy eyes: “What can this business do better than any company in the marketplace and be rewarded well?”

THE CALL TO RADICAL FOCUS

3 Steps to Riches in Niches:

1. Assassinate 90% of distractions

2. Amplify your unique genius

3. Affirm your legacy multipliers

Need an outside scalpel? 

1. Get the book: Succession Planning for Impact (7-step roadmap) 

2. Join a Breakthrough Mastermind Group (6 month focus intensives)

3. 1:1 Cultivating Impact Business Triage (legacy audit + action plan)

Your community needs your focused genius. The clock’s ticking.

Harry T. Jones