Guidance for COOs
There are five main strategies you can implement in your business to stimulate growth and increase sales:
- Cost Leadership: Organizations provide a low price, allowing them to compete for a broader customer base.
- Differentiation: Firms have a broader customer base because they are more unique. These firms offer a higher price and more differentiation for specific offerings.
- Focused Differentiation: Similar to the differentiation strategy but operates on unique features and a small market segment.
- Focused Cost Leadership: These organizations focus on a niche market and compete on price.
- Integrated Cost Leadership/Differentiation: This combines low-cost with differentiated features. This is also known as a hybrid strategy that combines all four business strategies above
Chief Operating Officers are instrumental in implementing these strategies and keeping your business on track.
COO’s Essential Functions:
- To provide leadership and management that mirrors the mission and core values.
- Responsible for achieving and surpassing business goals and objectives.
- Responsible for the measurement and effectiveness of all processes internal and external.
- Spearhead the development, communication, and implementation of effective growth strategies and processes.
- Collaborate with the management team to develop and implement plans for the operational infrastructure of systems, processes, and personnel.
- Motivate and lead a high-performance management team; attract, recruit and retain required members; provide mentoring.
- Act as lead “client-care officer” through direct contact with every client and partner.
- Foster a success-oriented, accountable environment within the company.
A COO can be seen as the rail in between the car on a racetrack ride at Disney. The COO needs to shape the direction of strategic goals and keep the team on the path to achieve them. This center rail keeps the car going along the track and does not allow it to take an incorrect path, it shapes the way the car moves, just as a COO operates in a business.