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- Bryan Aldaz
- 17 oct 2022
- 1 Min. de lectura
Actualizado: 24 oct 2022
Reliv: finding its differentiation factor
by Bryan Aldaz
Introduction
“Let’s start a business with this product”
How many times have you said that phrase?
I know, you have a ton of good ideas, but at the end of the day, you don’t know how to take your ideas out of your mind and make them true. You need to understand how the startup real world works, learn all about it, and then, start your own business. Fortunately for us, Future Founder is in charge of teaching you everything you need through its startup readiness simulation program. In fact, we do our activities based on a real startup, so we can acquire real experience and improve our skills via learning by doing.
In order to put an example, let’s study the case of Reliv: An Ecuadorian startup for online digital med consultations just a click away.
The first step was to get familiarized with Reliv. What are its opportunities? What could be improved? How does Reliv manage its threats? These questions were answered using the STEEPLE and SWOT analyses. In other words, by knowing the external and internal factors of the startup. At the same time, a strategic analysis helped to define the road such as objectives, key results, activities, and resources. Let’s walk through this journey.
Reliv
Since its foundation, Reliv has been helping patients to connect with their doctors. Thanks to a multidisciplinary team, the number of clients is growing, constantly, not just patients but partners. For that reason, the Ecuadorian startup is looking to help people in a unique way. I mean, what about bringing medicine to the most needy communities? Performing workshops, vaccination campaigns, lectures, etc.
In order to achieve this goal is important to implement a strategic analysis, then founders and volunteers will find a way to take medicine to rural communities in the country.
The road to follow
Choose a rural community.
Get in contact with the chosen community and listen to its needs.
Look for volunteers near the community.
Plan ahead medical topics based on the community.
Implement seminaries/workshops in the community.
How can Reliv achieve its goal?
Social security in the rural zone of Ecuador is failing, many patients can’t set an appointment, nor even visit their doctors. Moreover, social media is full of fake news such as using chloride to avoid COVID-19, drinking this beverage to heal cancer, etc. This is the reason why is important to teach how to act against diseases or disorders by means of medical workshops.
Therefore, the following systems will play an important role in this mission:
The Enterprise Management System develops the strategy and monitors the organization's performance.
The Financial Management System manages the flow of capital and financial metrics.
The Community Development System manages the community experience from the first contact.
The Improvement Management System organizes Reliv’s performance improvement, community feedback, and response.
In this way, the team can take care of the process, fix missteps, and implement new strategies in its further workshops.
The next step includes fieldwork, the team will work with surveys to understand and classify the data of the community. Thus, Reliv will be able to provide a major contribution to solving the problems of the community by taking its internal selection criteria into account:
Opportunities in the health industry.
Product differentiation.
Sustainable differentiated advantage.
Patient compliance.
But how do we know all these things? We use STEEPLE and SWOT analyses.
Check it out Reliv’s.
The STEEPLE analysis helps us to know more about how the startup is impacting several fields such as Social, Technology, Economic, Environment, Political, Legal, and Ethics.
They are external and internal factors that affect performance either positively or negatively.
Ready for the continuation? Let’s go.
On the other hand, we have SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats) analysis, these factors help us to improve our strategy, to innovate, and to grow.
Thanks to these analyses, we could plan our strategy. In fact, there is an alternative…
The alternative is to donate 10% of the profit to foundations for disadvantaged people. The idea’s good, so let’s evaluate both ideas in a decision matrix, hence we could make the best choice!
In the decision matrix, the criteria are the development of the differentiation factor, customer loyalty, and cost. Every criterion has a weight (1-3), and the considerations are ranked (1-3) in every criterion. The final step is to multiply the weight by each consideration. This ensures that the more important considerations are being given more weight, which will ultimately help you select the best alternative, the volunteer program. With this program, Reliv will earn human contact with the communities and will be able to develop its differentiation factor against the competitors in the health market.
If you care about the process the result is guaranteed
Planning and measuring our strategy will help us to follow the process and each part of it. For that reason, it is necessary to write down objectives, key results, activities, metrics, and resources. Here is a template for your further strategic roadmap. Make sure to read bold letters. Now it’s time to explore Reliv’s strategic roadmap.
Objective: Dedicate 10% of our income to volunteerism by 2023. (Make sure it is quantitative).
Template
Remember: you need 3 key results | Metrics (how do you measure your activities?) | Resources (what do you need?) |
Implement 3 workshops per month. (Forget about quality, here we need quantity) | Number of workshops performed successfully in the month. |
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1. Contact the chosen community's legal representative to know its needs (what they want to learn about). (This space is for the activities, you need 3) | 1/1 community’s legal representative sent the results of the survey ‘What do I want to learn?’ (Make sure that every metric must be linked with one activity) |
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2. Plan the content of the workshop. | 3 medical trending topics are sent to the community. |
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3. List everything needed for the workshop. | 50 chairs, one TV with HDMI, three tables, and one physical space confirmed. |
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| Metrics | Resources |
100+ new medical volunteers around the country. | Contact information of the volunteers in the database. |
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1. Use Google forms to know how many volunteers we have in the chosen community. | 15 doctors near the community confirmed their attendance. |
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2. Prepare some visual information (videos and images) to diffusion about the volunteer program. | 3 videos and 4 announcements posted on social media. |
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3. Explore the chosen community to evaluate if it fulfills some requirements such as hosting and lunch services. | 1/1 community accepts the conditions of hosting, lunch, etc. |
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| Metrics | Resources |
At least 50% of the chosen community attended the workshops. | 90% of the community signed the attendance. |
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1. Send a formal invitation to the community's legal representative. | Confirmation letter from the community’s legal representative. |
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2. Spread the voice via digital media. | Number of likes, shares, and comments on social media. |
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3. Have a registration station in each workshop. | 90% of the community attended the workshops. |
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What is the next step?
The next step is to spread the news: Reliv is taking care of its patients and society. Now, its founders, stakeholders, partners, doctors, and clients are working together to help the most needy communities in Ecuador by implementing the volunteer program and by using Reliv, respectively.
As a personal recommendation, Reliv needs to position what it does in such a way that even if one competitor was operating directly opposite it, customers would cross the road to do business with Reliv instead of its competitor.
Key Takeaways
Well, this is it. Through this project, I’ve learned how to identify a problem and propose its solutions, do STEEPLE and SWOT analyses, build a decision matrix, plan a strategic roadmap with objectives, key results, activities, and resources, and the most important thing: implement feedback from my peers and Future Founder Team.
However, not all is rosy. My biggest challenges were the STEEPLE analysis and the strategic roadmap, I didn’t remember how many times I had to implement feedback because I didn’t get them in the right way. For that reason, I advise you to read the instructions and understand what you have to do. Moreover, don’t be afraid to read others' opinions about your work, and keep your mind open. This will help you to implement feedback easier and, as a result, you’ll have a better product.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog as well as I did writing it. See you in my next blog!
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