Your business is always part of an ecosystem. So is mine. I am completely aligned with Microsoft business cycle that starts 1st of July and ends last of June. Therefore Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is the most important event for me and my TELLUS team. Why? Because during WPC I will get the first hunch of the direction that Microsoft is taking for the new fiscal year. This year, it will be all about devices and services (with lots of measure around this) and I have to align my services to reflect this direction. What it means in practice is that all our offers have to reflect and build upon devices and services for us to be able to help both Microsoft and Microsoft partners to align themselves with these objectives. If I continue stubbornly to message the “old fiscal year” objectives that do not reflect what the field needs to do, then please do not expect to have much support from your ecosystem, because they are not incentivized to care about that anymore. It might seem shortsighted (which it is many times), but that is they way it is with businesses today. Everybody has to cut their checks and to be able to do that, one has to look at where the money is coming from.
During the years, I have become pretty brutal in focus when it comes to my own business. I have see too many examples of entrepreneurs that are “all over the map” trying to do different things, but really not doing anything well. I do not want to be in that boat. Have I made mistakes? Sure, and lots of them. As an entrepreneur, I see money all of the place and it is one of the hardest things for me to look away from these opportunities especially if they do not contribute anything to the TELLUS “platform”. If these is value add to the platform, then I am willing to invest time in checking it out, but if it is not, then I have to walk away.
Do you have a focus in your business? If you are an SI, do you spread yourself too thin to too many things and then your team is perplexed as they seem not to know anything really well. If you are an ISV, do you have a focus in a vertical or functional area and become world known for it? If not, you need to revisit your plan as being “too many things to all is like not being anything to anybody”. I have witnessed this so many times that it is not even funny anymore. I suggest you run a small exercise using Business Model Canvas to see if your business makes sense.
What I would like you to do is to really contemplate who well you know your ecosystem and the internal working of it and if the answer is: “I really do not”, then you might want to consider doing something about it. Also, if you work within Microsoft ecosystem, you might want to segment it into smaller segments as there are more than 600k Microsoft partner to work with.
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