Every new venture whether it is a service business, an e-commerce startup, a manufacturing company or sales firm, all require proper tools and guidance to penetrate the market and generate revenues. When we think of the most innovative, industry-leading businesses such as Apple, Facebook or even SpaceX, the general perception that prevails is they all had it all figured out when they first started?
On the contrary, they were all born out of experiments, ideas that were crazy enough for rejection but were tried anyway. The story of Google is also relate-able.
Now an online behemoth, Google owns one of the top spots of the most inspiring corporate successes in the world. But how did it happen? Where did the innovative come from? How did it beat overcome its challenges? In this blog, we will share Google’s 6 business secrets of doing things differently and how you as a startup can benefit from them.
- Deciding on the Product
The main aspect that sets Google’s genius online business ventures and brilliant product engineering apart is the simple principle of lock and key. Fundamentally, the idea is to identify if the product is a good fit for the market or not while taking into account its usability in the long haul. This helps determine the product’s viability for the future and how well it impacts the target market. This is what Google’s CEO Larry Page often likes call as the “Toothbrush Test”, a simple assessment of knowing whether your product is something that will be used once or twice a day and make your customer’s life better.
For startups and entrepreneurs, whether the idea is a convenience, shopping, specialty, or unsought product, the real determinant in the cycle is its ‘continued use’ than ‘initial use’. It becomes quite difficult for a business to continuously invest in keeping customer’s attention and interest while spending resources in the sales operation at the same time. If the product is occasionally used, then a lot needs to be reworked to make it more vibrant for at least every day’s use.
- Integrating Dedicated Departments
Dividing the work into dedicated department helps the organization in streamlining its workflow while eliminating structural flaws that often take birth when a startup is formed. In many new companies especially e-commerce startups, projects are often subjected to poor coordination which ultimately results in poor execution. Consequently, the project becomes a drag and ends up giving a bad to the company. An e-commerce web development project, for instance, needs expertise of a specialist who knows what it means to develop a website and integrate eCommerce functions.
The concept of dedicated departments is not new to Google but has remained a part of its operations structure since we can remember. While the concept is essentially based on dividing work towards employees who own the precise expertise to execute them, Google takes it one step further by allocating work and projects based on the employee’s passion towards the subject. The work further trickles down to sub-departments, which all cohesively collaborate to effectively turnaround the project to its completion.
- Driving Business with Positivity
For many entrepreneurs and startups, saying ‘yes’ than ‘no’ is often hard, especially when it is a cultural imperative. If you look up the internet, it is full of the same door-slamming advice: “Successful Entrepreneurs know how to say, No!” Some even citing Warren Buffet with his rhetoric on practicing ‘no’ in successful businesses.
While the popular theory presses on ‘No’, Google has had great success in using ‘Yes’ to its advantage. In e-commerce ventures, willingness to say yes when an opportunity arrives takes a lot of mantle from your leadership since a single decision can easily cripple the entire operations. However, taking the right decision at the right time helps overcome the mental barriers that keep holding leadership decisions in pushing companies the extra mile that leads towards growth and profitability.
Google’s Executive Chairman from 2001 to 2015, Eric Schmidt emphasized the necessity of saying ‘yes’ in business culture in 2012 at UC Berkeley during a graduation keynote speech. In the speech he mentioned the significance of ‘yes’ across different stages of life and how deeply it complements the person’s success in achieving his/her business goals in professional life.
- Strengthening Your Core
For many new entrepreneurs, innovational and avant-garde ideas are the most popular pursuits when venturing into businesses today. However, the most common mistake they do is get ahead of themselves and neglect to establish a strong foundation to properly fund these business ideas when they reach their maturity.
Google’s overwhelming success is still owed to its core business activity of leading search engine and advertising. With time, Google has soundly managed its advertising and e-commerce empire by adapting to the latest trends and periodically introducing smarter features to entice its users. Now with ample resources at hand, Google supports several platforms for budding web-entrepreneurs and startups to help them nurture, build and grow their ideas. However, whether it is a disease-detecting pill, a driverless car, or an AI super processor, every initiative from Google compliments its core business in one way or the other.
- Hiring for Your Startup
One of the cornerstones of any successful startup venture is recruiting good talent. However, recruiting good talent itself requires hiring a good recruitment expert or an agency to take up the task. A good recruiter must be able to spot talent and induct them with agile boarding process into the company. The objective is to bring people on board who are smarter than they know and involve them in creating a healthy environment for competition that leads towards innovation and creativity.
Google’s recruitment department is a testament to its incredible workforce. Google has been using full-time recruiters to fetch the best talent in the market, train them and deploy them into departments they are passionate for. Today, Google has some of the largest numbers of employees in the word, finishing at 85,050 this march of 2018.
- Collaboration and Competition
When it comes to corporate culture, most organizations hold on to the traditional way of things in hopes to maintain the social dynamics of an office environment. Here, competing with peers is often stigmatized as a taboo in corporate culture and known to entail undesired outcomes.
While the idea of collaboration and competition together may seem as irrational as unicorns and rainbows, it is actually being practiced in the work environments of Google since its inception. Unlike most organizations, Google has been quite successful with its culture of collaboration. At Google, competition is never held as anathema to one another, and instead, it has served as key stimulant in motivating peers to set their goals and strive to meet them.
Moreover, Google’s long policy of reviewing each other annually has influenced a broader culture of synergy, friendly conduct and positive values that are now the core components of its environment. In a post one of Google’s employees Jes Meiret described working in Google with the term Googliness, that basically translates to helping others with no strings attached, being friendly and valuing users and colleagues.
For many entrepreneurs and startups that decide on establishing their physical office space and recruiting resources, this may prove as the golden rule of employee management and reflect amazing standing for the company’s corporate footprint in the market.