I have read an article a few months back in The Entrepreneur magazine (Nov 2011 titled “Fab forward.” The article focused mainly on how one company called Fabulis changed it’s name to Fab.com and it’s core ideas and went from being in the red to making profit in the very first month. The author of the article, Jason Daley, then wrote a piece on the steps and how a company can make a change of reinventing itself and going in a different direction to be so successful like Fab.com.
The first step that a management should decide is the timing and knowing when to make a change. The company must prepare itself and know when to make a change in the direction and know why. There are many factors that come into making a change, so you must weigh pros and cons.
The next step the managerial team must make is to decide what exactly it is that they want. Questions you should ask yourself are such as do you want to enter a new market or do you want to become a luxury brand? The team must decide what they want.
Once the company decides which direction to go in, the next and most critical step is TO FOLLOW THE PLAN! You might not be successful during the transition phase, but making a change requires stubbornness and you can’t just abandon ship and decide that it won’t work. There is a lot of time and hours and money that goes into changing, so you don’t want to waste any of it. Just FOLLOW THE PLAN!
Next, once you are in the transition stage, determine when the right time to switch the company’s vision is right and take your time. Many times, when making a change, the management might be responsible for running two separate businesses. You must have a exit strategy for your original company and follow through with iot. You can’t just wake up and say, “O.K. team, today we are no longer in business of selling shoes. We will sell cars now.” It takes time to make a switch.
Finally, once everything is in order, the management team must mentor and manage their employed workforce. The mentor ship is the most important as your new company’s direction and products are not the same and require different skills than your previous company’s direction. In the end the process of reinveting your company might be rough, but todo it correctly is just as hard.
Changing the direction of a company in form of reinventing itself takes a lot of time, money, and resources. Follow these steps, and your new company might end up just as profitable and successful as Fab.com!
This made me think back when I was interning at a government agency. We got a new Director and things were changing, and FAST. She wanted to revamp everything (out with old and in with the new). However, she wasn’t to good at transitioning us to this new system. And unfortunately she lost a lot of respect and many employees tried to transfer. I believe if she had mentored and managed us better like you were stating she would have been more successful.
“Change” is a very strong word. A word that is disliked by most people even though they demand it. People resist change however, when they have no option and they encounter change, there are all kinds of reactions that are received. I agree with you that change cannot be made overnight and there has to be a procedure that needs to be followed. You are absolutely right when you say that mentor ship is really important. I believe it is the best way to deal with change by making others more comfortable with the change.
Great article. I agree, I think it’s important to follow the plan as well. Companies that continue to switch up their mission and company vision shows instability and uncertainty.
Exit strategies are important as well. I agree with you that companies cannot completely run off track of what they originally went in for. Companies should always know their core values, and with any decision that is made, they need to ask themselves whether or not that decision goes for, or against those values. If it goes against it then the answer is clear – DROP it!
I have one idea for everyone to think about. Just wondering, does anyone know how much it cost to change their domain name to Fab.com? I’m sure that we have all seen the commercial for GODaddy.com which is a server, and web domain company. The average domain costs around 10$ depending on what the domain provider you go with, and with respect to that specific domains availability. A domain that is three letters is in the tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. This also depends on if whoever owns it is even willing to sell the domain, and trust me someone sold them the domain. It was most likely bought up oooo about six years ago if not before that.
When the World Wide Web really established itself and common users didn’t have to type in a IP address to gain access to a server to receive its information this really changed how the internet works and how we use it today. Imagine trying to get to Google.com. What if you had to type in 216.239.51.99. which is their IP every time you wanted to go search for something. This would be a pain wouldn’t it? Using domains which masks the IP number and replaces it with letters makes this process a lot more stream lined for the common user on the web today.
I digress; can you imagine what Google.com is worth? Well what about Fab.com, just think about it for a second? Once you own it, it only costs you a couple dollars a year to renew so that you have it forever. Once domains replaced IP addresses don’t you think that most of the three letter combination’s were bought up right away?
So to buy one probably takes a lot of negotiating and some amount of time to even contact who ever owns that web address. This was a huge move for this company to just even buy the web address, and then they will start to incur the cost of building a website that is not only user friendly, but that is also able to produce sales using the media space around the sites which you have to have clients lined up to purchase.
In my opinion this was a huge risk that as the original poster said, “the most critical step is TO FOLLOW THE PLAN”. Once you have this much time and money invested in something it is your baby. No matter what you are going to follow it through to the end to make sure that you at least gave it your all, and hopefully like this site did succeed.
I believe change is good, but for the good reason. Many a time my husband keeps telling me that, when you make a plan or decision you got to stick with it else, you will never achieve anything in life. I agree with you in the sense that, you need to follow your plan step by step and also make necessary adjustment to strategies that are not working well. This is the only way you can succeed.