Infrastructure is Essential to All Businesses

Have you look around in your city, even on the internet? When you do in real life, you will transport yourself from one location to another with different methods. Whether you walk, ride bicycle or motorcycle, drive a car or other vehicles – they are all means of transportation. The things you transport on – road – are the infrastructures that make it possible to move around the city.

In your home, there are kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room and so on, and they have infrastructures. Those roads, water pipelines, and so on allow you to live in your city. What do these have to do with business? I like to make it very simple for people to comprehend where I am going. The business idea can be seen as the house that people would live in.

For anyone to live in that house, they need to be able to cook, maintain hygiene, store food, electricity, water and so on. These things make it attractive for people – it covers all their basic needs in life. For people to find your company attractive, consider the same thing, and how they would attract people. Infrastructure could be the thing that make or break your business – today and tomorrow.

Our modern world has challenges for businesses – people entering and leaving – that proves that valuable things today becoming obsolete tomorrow. This is why we position ourselves in a dynamic environment – waking up to accept change. Changes are even visible in cities – they are consistently building new roads, houses, community centers and so on.

We need a dynamic infrastructure that can be changed in the future. The biggest challenge is the sunk cost, because it makes being dynamic harder. However, only when dwelling in negativities. Most sunk costs have already paid-off before they are unbeneficial. It might be crazy, but if an asset has generated significant revenue for a company, it has paid its due! For that reason, it could be used for other purposes or sell.

Your business has objectives to achieve/accomplish with SMART-method. How you plan to achieve every function/objective should have respective infrastructure. The most challenging aspect of infrastructure is establishing how these are interacting with one another. In these aspects, don’t focus on your competitors, but yourself. It proves your capabilities to yourself.

If you look at everything the company has: sales and marketing strategies, tactical and operation strategies, risks assessments and managements, research and developments, and so on, you will realize that everything participate in the big picture. There has to be a way to bring all these things together – infrastructure. Each objective/function has a parent (how), because how to get what you want is more important than what.

How tells your infrastructure, and how the “road” must be for it to achieve/fulfill that objective/function. Clarifying how to accomplish each objective is easy. But connecting them is a different story. For example if one objective focus on simplifying relationship between customers and the company, while another wants to maintain 600 customers within the next three months, they have to interact.

The simplification of relationship has to be constructed in a way that appeals to the masses, while aiming for 600 customers, which causes problem, because dissatisfaction rate was about 20%. The challenges are what connects the two, and how to link them. Do you know why? Because stabilizing how to simplify customer relationship covers much things, but connecting it to something else change things: using the customer relationship to attract as many people as possible.

Traditionally, a lot of things can happen on the way. Let me run a scenario – real life – that I have seen several times before. In a bus terminal, buses are aligned horizontally. Among them, there are two buses, three four buses in-between them that leave at the same time. These two buses follow the same route (to some extent). When one bus reverse, and start driving off, the other bus blocked its path, when it reverses.

The buses followed each other, with the blocker in front. But before they follow different paths, the blocked one in the beginning reached the destination first – the one that block comes second. It means something happens on the way that allows one to overtake the other. Business is similar – dynamic. Infrastructure must be very well prepared, before execution to achieve objectives. It is not about the what, but the how. It is the establishment of how your business will operate, interact, compete and achieve all of its goals.