Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 2nd Edition

STEP 10Define Your Core

In This Step, You Will:

• Determine the single thing that you will do better than anyone else that will be very difficult for others to copy. This may be a capability or set of assets that you may or may not yet have today but you will develop for the future.
• Identify other things (i.e., moats) that provide you with competitive advantage and likely buy you time to develop and reinforce your Core.

You need to figure out something that you do that will make you better than anyone else at producing a solution for your customers. This will be the new venture's eventual crown jewels.

Why This Step, and Why Now?

Having a clear definition of your Core will allow you to focus your limited resources to build and reinforce it. It will also ensure you do not do all the work to create a market and then have someone come in and steal it away from you because you did not think strategically. You do this analysis now because you now have sufficient context to understand the real driver of your value creation, as well as the general market dynamics.

Let's Get Started

Alert: This is usually the hardest step of the 24 Steps. So far, you have focused almost exclusively on meeting the needs of a well‐defined target customer. Now you will start looking to the future ...