FEATURED POST OF THE WEEK

Our long-form article of the week. You can always view the current and past featured posts on Empower’s blog.

A look inside: How Empower designs businesses for long-term growth

At Empower, our tagline is “Business design for long-term growth.” When we unveiled our visual identity and logo, I briefly described what we mean by “business design.” As I mentioned then:

In short, business design is the process of designing a business — putting the building blocks together to build a viable business model. There are emerging frameworks for business design, and while those are structured, rigorous and academic, at Empower, we’ve applied it slightly differently, through our lens of optimizing business operations to drive greater success.

To give you a peek into our process, I’m going to explain what designing your business for long-term growth means in practice. I could probably write pages on this topic, but you’d stop reading. So, I’ll aim to balance context with brevity 😊

In the end, Empower helps you:

• Free up more time to focus on growth and strategy instead of daily business activity.

• Improve operational agility.

• Align your strategy with execution.

• More efficiently manage resources.

• Deploy strong business systems, processes and workflows that can handle growth without compromising quality.

Let’s get into it!

Business analysis

At the core, we want to understand how you’ve architected your business.

We view the business as a set of interconnected systems working together to power all activity and deliver your products and services. Changes in one area can impact the whole operation. To ensure we’re designing your business for a long-term future, we examine each piece of the whole and then identify areas for optimization.

If you work with us, business analysis starts before you even sign the proverbial dotted line. It begins with the first conversation. Once you’re officially onboard, we take you through an onboarding survey that enables us to go deeper, test our hypotheses and assumptions, and gather materials to complete a well-rounded assessment.

What do we examine?

A lot of things. Here’s a condensed list to give you an idea:

• Strategic alignment

• Business model review

• Market and customer analysis

• Brand and go-to-market approach

• Operational reviews of key systems, processes, workflows and bottlenecks

• People and resource allocation

• Financials

• Technology

This paints a balanced picture of your past and present. We must invest the time to know where you’ve been and, importantly, why, so that we can most effectively guide you to where you want to be.

What business analysis isn’t

It’s not a 1-hour call during which we throw out a bunch of poorly crafted ideas and leave you trying to figure out how to take action.

Innovation

Designing a business for long-term success requires innovation and creativity. At Empower, we strive to think differently about how to streamline operations and uncover new opportunities.

Innovation can take many forms:

• Process improvements

• New business models

• Technology adoption

• Market expansion

Sometimes, small, consistent improvements to how your business runs can move the needle substantially. Other times, more disruptive approaches may be necessary, requiring bold changes to your market approach.

Coming from the tech startup world, where fast-paced innovation and creativity aren't optional but essential to stay competitive, I've ingrained this mindset into Empower's philosophy. We approach each of our business partners with curiosity, not preconceptions, and use that inquisitiveness to create innovative solutions every time.

What innovation isn’t

It’s not pushing a new software platform that promises to solve all your problems at once.

Design-thinking principles

Design thinking focuses on problem-solving with the user’s (i.e., customer’s) needs at the forefront. This customer-centric approach is something we strongly believe in at Empower — when designing a business, it’s critical to balance profitable business models with customer desirability and overall feasibility.

Whether through building empathy for your customers, developing an awareness of their needs and challenges, studying user behavior, speaking to customers directly or analyzing their journey, we want to be grounded in their mindset when they interact with your brand as much as we understand yours as representing the business.

Making this a key part of our process encourages collaboration and brings together diverse perspectives, helping surface creative solutions that enhance your entire ecosystem. In addition to benefitting your business’s operations, using aspects of design-thinking principles can lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, also crucial to your long-term growth.

What design-thinking principles aren’t

It’s not applying an approach that came directly from a case study just because it worked for another business.

Bringing it all together

By combining these three pillars — business analysis, innovation and design-thinking principles — we’ve crafted a method of working with Empower’s partners to design the next stage of their businesses.

We understand that as a business owner or startup founder, you may be facing growth challenges rooted in operational bottlenecks and resource constraints. Our goal is to help break through those barriers and build a stronger foundation.

If you’re ready to elevate your business and want to learn more about how we can help, let’s start a conversation. Head into 2025 feeling confident your operations can support your goals.

WEEKLY DOSE OF EMPOWERMENT

The weekly dose of Empowerment is meant to provide one weekly tip that’s both practical and approachable, to help drive incremental improvement to your day-to-day. We’re always open to your contributions as well. If you would like to submit a tip to be shared with the Empower community in a future newsletter, please reach out at [email protected] with the subject line “Weekly Dose of Empowerment Submission.”

The personal SWOT

What is it?

You may have heard the concept of a SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats — analysis related to companies when they’re defining strategy and positioning. But, have you ever thought of flipping the script and building a personal one?

I came across this suggestion recently and while it hadn’t crossed my mind before, it made perfect sense. As business owners, we often try to assess areas in which we excel, those in which we could use a helping hand, potential future assets we possess and our liabilities.

Reasons for this include:

• Improved self-awareness.

• Deciding where we should focus our energy and time.

• Assessing what resource gaps exist on our team and who to hire.

• Identifying priority areas of personal and professional development.

We’ll often conduct this assessment in our heads rather than putting pen to paper. Developing a personal SWOT enforces the latter, and allows us to keep a record of ourselves as business leaders over time.

How do I create my personal SWOT?

You can put together this introspective analysis in a few simple steps.

• Define your objective: The primary purpose for doing this analysis (e.g., to evaluate your ability to launch a new business line or evaluate your management skills).

• Create a 2 × 2 visual: Like the example below.

• Understand the S-W-O-T:

  • Strengths (Internal): Your abilities that give you an advantage.

  • Weaknesses (Internal): Your abilities that could be improved.

  • Opportunities (External): External factors you can use to your benefit.

  • Threats (External): External factors that could limit your progress.

• Put pen to paper: Fill out your SWOT 2×2.

• Analyze and take action: Assess what you put on the page, try to match up opportunities with your strengths and begin developing ideas for how to mitigate threats. Then, create your plan of action.

We must understand ourselves just as much as we do our business environment. Creating a personal SWOT is one approachable way to deepen that understanding. Give it a try and maybe you’ll uncover something new.

Here’s one I put together as an example:

JESSICA’S READ, OR LISTEN, PICK OF THE WEEK

A little something that got my gears turning this week and might pique your interest as well!

From Forbes: Taking Automation To The Edge: Tackling The Store Operations Challenge

TL;DR

Forbes recently published an article about how the in-store experience is evolving for retailers and consumers, and the operational challenges surfacing as a result. The author highlights the integration of digital platforms with physical stores, which creates a more seamless, multi-channel experience for customers. It also presents new obstacles the retailer must overcome to ensure consistency, uptime and a streamlined experience.

The result is that many retailers are embracing technology and deploying real-time operations solutions to optimize these experiences.

The observed impact of these implementations includes:

• Less downtime when there’s an issue with a digital loyalty program.

• Reducing the need for centralized IT by automating common failures of core platforms like point-of-sale (POS).

• Improved customer satisfaction by shortening resolution times for technical issues on digital platforms.

Since I know we have brick-and-mortar business owners in this community, I wanted to highlight the piece and also get people’s perspectives on what they’re seeing in their respective markets. If you read this and want to share your thoughts, simply reply to this newsletter!

JUST FOR FUN

Really, this section is just for fun. Who knows what will be in store each week?

BOO!

Since we moved our newsletter to bi-weekly, this will be the last edition before Halloween. In the interest of being a little spooky and a little fun, I asked ChatGPT to generate three Halloween costume ideas for an “operations nerd.” The following was the output.

Which one would you choose?

LOOKING FOR MORE EMPOWERMENT?

You’ve worked hard to build your business. Let’s work together to make it last. We want to be your partner in the journey to develop the business that lives into your vision.

There are four primary ways Empower can partner with you to support getting your business to the next level. Click the image below to learn more about our core offerings.

If you’re ready to take the step, reach out to discuss how we can support your goals. 

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, I encourage you to subscribe and join the Empower community.