What we’re gonna talk about is the eight characteristics of highly successful companies.
There’s touch stones that successful companies hit
It’s Profitable
You make money, I talk about this all the time. The law of profit. Does your company make money? We learned this through the 90s where all the dot-coms looked good, but none of them were profitable. They were all propped up by venture capitals and they were not making any money.
So the first characteristic of a highly successful company is you actually are making money. You’re not surviving off of lines of credit and loans. So ask yourself, Is my business profitable? Do we have positive cash flow? I’ve always said, if you’re not putting money in reserves, you’re only an employee of your own company. You’re in the survival stage.
You Dominate Your Niche
A successful business dominates its niche, it’s category, wherever you’re competing in. People know that’s the company I want to do business with. That’s the product I would buy. That’s who I would hire. So step back and look at your niche. Are you dominating it? When you look at great companies, we all know why we talk about them. They dominate their niche. We know what we would buy if we had a choice. We know the products that we would buy, because they dominate a niche. If you aren’t dominating your niche, that’s a characteristic that you are lacking that I think you need to absolutely fixed.
Your Competitors Recognize You
Not only do your customers recognize you, but so does your competition.
I like to think in the businesses that I own, if I say the name of my first company within any of my competition, anybody that would be interviewing for a job in our industry would want to come work for us. We’re that dominant. And the second company we’ve started, I believe we’ve made that case as well. Our competition clearly knows we’re out there doing business.
You Have a Recognizable Brand
Your image, your logo. People hear your tagline and they immediately tie the two together. How recognizable is your brand? Do you even have a brand? Or are you trying to build a brand? I’ve said in every book I’ve written that you start creating a brand from day one and if you do that, then your brand will in fact be recognized.
When you see the Amazon logo, you know what it is. The same goes for Nike and Domino’s Pizza.
You can build this in your local area by doing great repetitive marketing where you have a brand image that people can recognize that’s not cheap looking. It doesn’t look like your 14-year-old nephew did it as a class project.
You Have a Loyal Customer Base
Highly successful companies have a loyal customer base. When I go to look for a car, the first place I goes down to my BMW dealer. I’m a loyal customer. You know, I went and looked at other vehicles, but I just love a BMW. I never buy a car that can’t get service locally, so I don’t fear out into the Maserati land.
When you build a great company, you have a loyal customer base. We have more than 20k customers in one company that I own, and they repeat. They continue to do business with us. One-third of the estimate requests we get every week is via that customer base, so that’s a characteristic of a highly successful company.
You Lead in Innovation
Anything that’s new, anything that’s improving, everything that’s getting better, you’re on the forefront of.
Your company wants to lead with that. Your company is always innovating for the better. If you’re stagnant and you’re doing the same thing you did 20 years ago, I’d say you’re probably not a highly successful company unless it’s digging gold.
You Attract the Best Talent
People want to come work for you. They recognize your company. Talented people recognize great companies and they want to work for a highly successful company. If you’re not attracting very talented people, then again, I’d say you’re probably not a highly successful company. Walk in the building tomorrow, look around, and see if you have winners working for you.
You’re a Durable Company
What does that mean? It sort of means you have cash or credit. You can survive a coronavirus or a downturn in the economy. Well, how can you do it? Because you have cash reserves. You have lines of credit because you have good credit. You have patents, trademarks, things that make it you hard for your competition to step into what you’re doing. Patents protect you, that’s why I always talk about protecting yourself and your business and one of that is your intellectual property. It’s a way that you protect yourself and you protect your competitive advantage.
