Rick Funston speaks on business warfare Tuesday at Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) 2017 in Las Vegas.It doesn’t require a helmet or a weapon, but Rick Funston says business is war.
Competitors are constantly and aggressively battling, fighting tooth and nail for market share and customers and a spot at the top of the food chain.
But life on top is fleeting. Funston says the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company today is just 15 years. Business changes fast, and no matter what you do, your business is always at risk.
Speaking Tuesday at Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) in Las Vegas, Funston told a room of distributors that their industry is not only at war, but also zeroing in on an inevitable change.
And in such an aggressive business marketplace, Funston says distributors who don’t (or refuse) to adapt are putting nails in their own coffin.
“The forces of creative destruction are always at work,” he says. “Sooner or later every industry-leading business model will change.
“How will you adapt? What can you do?”
Funston says distributors’ best course of action to achieve long-term success is dedicating time and resources immediately to predicting and preparing for the future. He says distributors should be regularly questioning what is coming next? What industry shifts lie ahead? And what can distributors do, proactively, to prepare for them?
The good thing is most of the aftermarket already knows, Funston says. In a survey of distributors and suppliers before HDAW, Funston says responders in both channels agreed that consolidation, training, e-commerce and direct distribution are some key issues that will come to a head in the market in the coming year.
But Funston says identifying risks is the easy part.
Disrupting the conventional aftermarket model requires distributors to “think different” and commit to radical business plans that look beyond the present and into the future.
Funston says no business was better at this than Apple. He says when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 he drove the company to shed conventional business tactics and use “asymmetric business warfare” to attack its competitors’ “weakness of their sameness with differences.”
IBM’s slogan was “Think,” so Jobs and Apple committed to think differently. IBM ran its computers using Windows, so Jobs and Apple built their own operating system. IBM was committed to desktops, Jobs and Apple became the world’s top-selling mobile and tablet producer.
Asymmetrical business warfare is thinking out of the box on steroids, Funston says. It’s changing the “entire way of thinking of a business.”
“Describe the box and what’s in the box and then describe the opposite,” he says. “That’s where you find radical innovation.”
And like war, Funston says the key is to attack first. “Do onto others before they do it to you.”
