Product Focus - R J Brennan, CPA

Before we can determine what products make sense for our business, we need to first record what we want to achieve in our business and why, what specific value we provide to our customers, and define some guiding principles for our behavior. This makes it easier for everyone in the company to focus on what makes the company successful. We define the unchanging centre of our business that helps us to make sensible decisions about products that we sell and how we do that. It confirms direction and helps to guide us when we detect opportunities or threats in our business environment. See New Products for more on this.

Our products must take greatest advantage of our company's unique strengths. Economically, they use capabilities that we already have and reduce the requirement for new resources. We choose products where we can add the greatest value - even if they are only parts of complete products. If a part of our product can purchased more cheaply than we can produce it then we might buy it. Selling a group of products that appeal to a market segment might reduce production, marketing and distribution costs, making us more competitive and profitable. Finding other market segments that might use our products makes sense for the same reasons, as well as reducing our business risk.