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Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing) talk about the importance of planning for future growth with a 3-to-5-year plan.

Part 3 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: That leads us right into our next bullet point, which is my favorite thing I hear you say all the time. “What is your 3-to-5-year plan?” If you don't have a 3-to-5-year plan for you marketplace business, then how do you know what you're choosing today is going to be able to accomplish or potentially be morphed into or grow or shrink or be customized or scale into what your plans are?  

Chris, this is one of my favorite things you talk about. Go ahead and talk about the 3-to-5-year plan for eCommerce marketplaces. 

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CHRIS: Well, I think this is a great topic. Thank you, Ron. And this is really important from a business perspective. And regardless of your role, if you're the owner of the business, a key leader within the organization, or someone who's just simply at the core, very passionate about where the business going, etc., or any or all of the above. 

The bottom line is there is a huge opportunity within any company to deliver more value to customers. Those constituent customers can include and should include both vendors and the actual buyers within the B2B or C2C marketplace environment. And it really should ideally be something that you're constantly asking yourself the question, “What would it take to 10X what we're doing right now, what would be the most valuable area for us to focus on that's going to deliver the most value, that we're confident we can— within the entire industry—we can be the best at. 

These are the clarifying questions that, even though they may be relatively general from a business perspective, they then can be boiled down back into your marketplace software selection. So if you think about it, what is the alignment of the software to be able to help support and drive that vision of where you can go over the next 3 to 5 years? 

And the reality of being a marketplace business owner or a key leader or someone who's passionate is, you may not accomplish all of these visionary elements, but that's not really the point. The point is moving in that direction. And you may exceed that vision, too. Ultimately, the bottom line is that we've worked with so many clients who have had massive success, and the ones that have massive success are really looking further ahead than the others who are just focused on the short term. 

If you can allow yourself to consider the short term, which is a tactical requirement, while also looking ahead and having at least a reasonable amount of attention on that 3-to-5-year timeline, this is going to put you into a position where, generally speaking, you're going to be able to take the long-term view and consistently outperform because of that.

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CHRIS: Now, what are some of the tactical specifics here? Well, I'll give you a few examples. One of the things that we see, just in the near term, is things like leveraging deep learning and AI. And this is really, really potent within a marketplace because, again, we're focusing on self-service. Now, you're not going to see a whole lot of AI and machine learning and deep learning built into marketplace eCommerce platforms. But is the vendor that you're working with incorporating that, and how can you leverage this automated intelligence to really better serve your customers?  

That's just one mechanical example, but it's probably a good one that you can ask yourself, like if I had someone who was full time just focusing on these customers to give them better service, give them better information, provide them recommendations that were really useful reports that are specific to them, etc. What would that look like? Because that's what AI can do. And that's just again, one example. 

Same thing with automation, how integrated are your systems? And this is something that is an endless opportunity, and you just want to evaluate what the law of diminishing returns is, based on where you're at with your eCommerce business. But over time and at the limit, you want to fully automate as much as you can based on prioritizing the things that are valuable within your business workflow. 

These are the questions that in the topics that we really strongly encourage you to think about. if you're watching this and you're listening, you're probably at some point in the lifecycle where if you iterate on this question and you get it to brass tacks, and we're always happy to help, you're welcome to reach out and let us know. You will probably put yourself in a position to double or even 10X over a relatively short period of time by focusing on the right things. 

RON: Yeah. Agreed. I love the old cliche: If you don't know where you're going, every road will get you there. 
 
CHRIS: Yes, very true. 
 
RON: Even failure. Or even going sideways and no growth whatsoever, just surviving. So, yeah, I love that. 

Continue to Part 4 to learn about budgeting for an eCommerce marketplace.

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