“The greatest human quality is that of becoming unstoppable! And you become unstoppable by refusing to quit, no matter what happens” (Brian Tracy).
“SMART” is an acronym that I have developed, and successfully use in facilitating business and organisational coaching programmes. It describes the characteristics of organisations or businesses that have the potentials to achieve market differentiation through effective brand profiling. “SMART”stands for Sustainable; Marketable; Advancing; Reliable; and “Talent-driven”. These are the five major characteristics that would make an organisation or business to succeed no matter the challenges that it faces in the operating environment.
The realities of each of these five major characteristics of the “SMART” organisation need to be critically and continuously evaluated and benchmarked by the management of every organisation and business. Such an exercise will assist in positioning the organisation or business to be truly competitive and differentiated in the marketplace. The five characteristics of the “SMART” organisation are highlighted below.
1. Sustainable
Most businesses have the same challenges. These challenges relate to how to attain and sustain high profitability, especially in tough times. For these businesses, survival is the ultimate. However, beyond survival, there must be profitability and growth in order to be sustainable through challenging economic periods, and be well positioned after it. But, there is more to business sustainability than just maintaining the business. Business sustainability in the real sense suggests the situation whereby the business or organisation continues to grow beyond the regular or average industry or sector growth. The worst case scenario is that it keeps pace with the industry average.
Sustainability potential must therefore be seen more in the context of incremental growth of people within the organisation. This means that everyone must commit to continuous self-improvement and wholesome transformation, such that at least more than 50% of employees are sufficiently motivated to keep on learning and improving. They must be motivated to get out of their comfort zones so that they can grow effectively. The comfort zone is in reality the death zone where a person’s creativity is stifled and innovativeness is thwarted.
However, for business sustainability to be entrenched in an organisation, there must be honest discussions about what can be achieved and what is outside the realm of immediate access. It is such honesty that helps the organisation to create new frontiers of opportunities while seeking ways to deal with its challenges.
Therefore, if you are involved in the management of a business or organisation, it might be helpful to assess its current sustainability status, as well as your projections, expectations, needs and strategies for improved sustainability. One of the purposes of business and organisational coaching is to help to identify the “hidden wealth” within the business. This is particularly by carrying out a business diagnostic assessment, which highlights the major strengths and opportunities for the business.
Following from the results of the diagnostic assessment, the experienced business coach works with the business owners and managers to build business systemisation and comparative advantage processes around the business uniqueness. This is the best and most realistic strategy to ensure market differentiation, competiveness and high niche market service possibilities and opportunities. These are factors that ensure business sustainability, because it also has the potentials to get the entire business team to be motivated around the same objectives, which is brand differentiation.
2. Marketable
Every organisation is in business essentially to offer solutions to their customers’ problems and meet their needs through marketable products and services. As long as the organisation continues to perform these roles, its products and services would be marketable. But not only that, the organisation itself becomes well profiled as a brand in the marketplace. The word “brand” in this regard implies a distinctive difference in a business, and/or its product or service which people recognise and associate with through their purchasing behaviour.
Branding is therefore the process of putting a distinctive label on an organisation or a product that people love to be associated with because of certain ‘unique’ characteristics. The end game in effective branding strategy is always the creation of a distinctively appealing product or service that keeps customers in
love with it. The plan is that the product or service exactly fits the passions, desires, needs, and expression of those that can afford to purchase it and motivate other people to do the same. If the brand name of a product or company for instance is perceived as high value, it enjoys several advantages over its competitors, particularly in relation to pricing.
The provision of practical and easily adaptable tips, tools and techniques to promote the core brand values of businesses and organisations are among the outcomes of most entrepreneurship and business coaching interventions. The knowledable and experienced business coach in this regard helps to work on key ‘perception shifts’ of particular products and or services, as well as the organisation itself, as the brand popularity and sustainability is market-driven.
The understanding in this regard is that branding, as well as brand marketing and promotion should never be considered to be a single shot deal. The exercise would require consistent research, development, marketing and retooling of all of the processes that reposition a marketable organization and its products.
Engaging the services of an experienced professional business coach, who is responsible for bringing in fresh ideas and perspectives, especially through active questioning is of great benefits to any business and organisation. This is valuable particularly when the business coach adapts practical coaching tools and models, such as those that are focused on market and marketing intelligence.
3. Advancing
The organisation or business that is advancing is one which offers great opportunities for future growth, especially in a rapidly changing local and global economy. This is particularly achieved though business innovation, market-driven ideas, leadership agility and flexibility, as well as proactive response to customer needs. Such potentials create hope, anticipation, excitement, and commitment about the future. These are the factors that also energise the management and personnel to become more creative and confident, as they establish their 
presence in the marketplace.
It is challenges like these that help to develop the minds of people in the organisation, as they have to think of ways and means of achieving the set goals. This is what is referred to as “stretch-marking”, which implies outstripping standards. It goes beyond “bench-marking”, which means keeping with or matching standards.
As long as the personnel have the belief that they can achieve, they would retain a strong focusing system along the way. This is one of the most realistic ways to grow as a company. It is achieved by “stretching” peoples’ thoughts, abilities and desires to achieve excellence. And, inspirational organisational leaders that have embraced the concept of business advancement generally challenge their people to stretch themselves well beyond their limits and comfort zones.
The major benefit of entrepreneurship and business coaching in facilitating business adaptability in ensuring business advancement is linked with the concept of facilitating “LIFE”. “LIFE”in this regard stands for: “Leadership”, “Innovation”, “Finance”, and “Entrepreneurship”. The focus is on making the owners and managers of organisation or business to be response, rather than reactive to changes. In this regard, the business coach challenges them to be “prophets” to, and in their business, by predicting future changes, and how those changes will bring advantage to the business through the “4A’s”: Adjustment, Adaptation, Activation, and Alignment.
The most important thing is that the business stakeholders eventually love what they are encouraged to do, primarily because it is also for their own benefit. They therefore love their leader(s) for making them do what benefits them and not merely what benefits the leader(s). This creates better staff engagement, improved team participation and enthusiasm in the workplace. It also enables the leader(s) to work from a model that has been tested and improved over time. Is your organisation committed to “bench-marking” or “stretch-marking”? In which areas can you make the greatest advancement?
4. Reliable
As has already been mentioned, marketing is a matter of perception, and it is the organisation or business that succeeds in positioning itself as the most realistic solution provider that wins the battle for comparative advantage in the marketplace. It is for this reason that business reputation is so critical. If the organisation has a reputation in the market as being trust worthy, capable, responsible and responsive, the business would continue to soar. But if reliability or credibility is destroyed, there is always the danger that the market would also react negatively.
Reliability demands that you are able to deliver on the promises made to your customers, suppliers, partners and personnel. It also suggests that you are determined to see your business promote the values that the market will associate with it, whether and whenever deals are contemplated or consummated. This is what determines the perception of credibility. Credibility is 
like an egg. Once it is cracked and broken, there is no glue that can patch it up. This is because credibility relates to fundamental beliefs that are rooted in foundational attitudes. As a result, your credibility in business is therefore non-negotiable because it is what projects you in the business circles locally, regionally and globally as being reliable. Interestingly, with the high business connectivity in the modern age, business circles everywhere in the world have become unusually very small and closely-knit.
This is good for reliable organisations, but bad news for those that don’t care much about their image. And, for those that reliability is essential, there are certain attributes that must always stand out in all business dealings. These are manifested in the organisation being honourable; having good reputation; possessing personal integrity; showing loyalty to others; being honest; manifesting openness; displaying personal moral attitudes; having high regard for people; among others.
No matter the environment in which a person or organisation operates, people soon get to know who the person or organisation really is in terms of personal and business reputation. This will go a long way to suggest whether such a person or organisation can be trusted or not. This will of course also have impact on the business that is being operated, because the reputation of the owners most often precedes that of their business. So, always ensure that your reliability and credibility cannot be questioned.
5. Talent-driven
Great organisations are those that make solid investments in their people. This is by seeking, developing, repackaging and unleashing the talents of their employees. The focus is to cause the talents to ultimately benefit all stakeholders through innovative utilisation and deployment. Employees need organisational leaders that believe in them and can inspire them to greater performance by working alongside them to refocus and support them to achieve their goals.
People with potentials all need leaders that can spot their potentials and assist them to nurture those potentials to yield positive results. They would also be there 
for their people as a confidential and trusted sounding board, so that they can take decisions more confidently and make certain crucial moves assuredly. A lot of times, what these people really need to unlock their potentials are the right environment and the right people to support them to unleash those potentials.
These would be achieved through the education that they receive; the environment where they develop; and the people that they come across. It is seeing such potentials in otherwise “dull” people that make some organisational leaders to be outstanding mentors and coaches, as they assist people to overcome their limitations and become great individuals. The question is: how does your organisation identify, nurture, develop and unleash talents for impact in the marketplace? Are there areas of improvement, and how can such improvement be carried out?
Dr Emmanuel Imevbore is an executive coach, management consultant and business strategist. He is the CEO of International Coaching and Mentoring Institute, a specialist coaching and coach-training organisation. He can be reached by email: emmanuel@ic-mi.com; and WhatsApp: +27 79 259 1768.
