When it comes to growing your business, the capitalist in us all wants to do everything for everyone, to expand in all directions and keep all our clients equally happy. However, in these more enlightened times we appreciate that this sort of disparate strategy can only serve to confuse your audience. Growing your business is about making more money but the key to doing this doesn´t lie in simply trying to be everything for everyone – no company can possibly do this well. Successfully growing your business relies on fully understanding the value you offer your customers and what they need or expect from you – what you need to establish is your “value discipline”.

In an article for the Harvard Business Review in 1993, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema offer up a new business model that consists of three core value disciplines. This model puts forward the proposition that the key to growing your business lies in identifying precisely the make-up of your customer base and, through understanding their fundamental expectations, you will be able to identify which of the three core value disciplines your business should be pursuing as its primary focus.

Some business owners don´t consider analysing their own enterprise because it´s their company and they assume they know everything about its operations and finance. This may be informally true, but savvy business owners know that business analysis and valuation is key when pursuing these strategies:

1. Operational excellence

The first of the three disciplines is operational excellence, an approach to growing your business that focuses on delivering goods or services at the lowest possible price.

2. Customer intimacy

The second value discipline is customer intimacy. Each individual´s interaction with customers who seek this value discipline is only a small part of a much bigger picture, with them returning time after time on account of the extra lengths to which you´re willing to go to meet their every need. Customer intimacy means that instant, day-to-day profit takes a back seat compared to a long-term strategy of growing your business by developing business relationships.

A shop such as John Lewis, for example, will attract customers not merely through competitive pricing and a broad range of stock but also through the personal attention and expertise of their sales staff. A customer buying a washing machine there may find themselves directed towards a cheaper yet equally effective model – the kind of move usually seen as disastrous if you´re intent on growing your business. The impression this helps to create, however, means that the immediate loss of not selling the more expensive machine is more than offset when the same customer returns to purchase a cooker or fridge freezer later on due to the trust they have now in the retailer.

3. Product leadership

The third value discipline identified by Treacy and Wiersema is product leadership. Companies who hope to develop their businesses by being product leaders will know that their customers expect them to react quickly to the latest innovations and rapidly bring products to market that either follow market trends or are cutting edge. Therefore, growing your business through product leadership requires a heavy emphasis on research and development, openness to new and unusual ideas and a willingness to take risks.

Apple is a classic example of a company for which product leadership is key and they are generally regarded, quite understandably, as being a massive success. The risk taking involved in growing your business along the product leadership value discipline is massive. Apple´s history is punctuated by many failed and long-forgotten products such as the Apple Pippin games console and the Apple Puck mouse. The willingness to take a chance on these ultimately unsuccessful products marks Apple out as product leaders par excellence.

Growing your business by following the value discipline model does come with a couple of important caveats. Firstly, when you´ve discovered whether your customers value your pricing policy, relationship management or trend-setting characteristics most of all, you should not completely forget about the other two because the value discipline model merely shows you which to focus most attention on.

And, secondly, before you entirely change the way your business is structured, you should also look at your findings in the context of the real world – does growing your business in this new way make sense when held up against your historic strategy, your industry and what your competitors are doing?

Bearing all this in mind, we hope that our review of the value discipline business model has made you think about the strength of understanding your customers´ expectations when formulating your strategy for growing your business.