What does reinvent mean and when should you consider it? Not when profits are down or when your cash flow is dangerously low. By then it is too late. Businesses often under-perform even though the cash seems to be flowing and the profitability is just OK. You aren't doing as well as you did or as well as you should be doing. Things change. The premises and assumptions, upon which you built your business, change. The mission of the business changes. In some instances, small business owners try to change but they do it incrementally, often after the fact. The time to reinvent your business may be now. Start with the mission of your business, its reason for being. Why does it exist today? Is that different than when it started? Examine the definition of business. It is a process of taking raw materials, goods or services, from a beginning point and adding value along the way to the final user. Has the process changed for your business? Are the products and services the same as they were? Depending on how long you have been in business, the change could be remarkable. During the past 10 years, technology and the internet has had an enormous effect on almost every business. Has it affected yours? If so, how? Have your suppliers or your products changed? If you are a service provider, how is it different than when you started? Communications has effected every business; the cell phone, e-mail, the internet. Product changes have been significant. Yes, shoes are still shoes, but that is about all one can say. Fashions change; materials change: suppliers change, packaging, often the thing that attracts customers and creates the desire to buy, has undergone great change in material, colors and the way products are presented to the buyer.

How are you adding value? How are you competing with buying on the internet? Are the services you provide, adequate in today's marketplace? Service providers in the past clearly knew more than their clients. Today the internet educates the buyer and you must therefore deal with a more knowledgeable client.

Here are some questions to ask yourself. Do I understand the process, as I did when I started? Am I buying the right product, the right mix, and the right quality, at the right price? Am I using the right suppliers? How am I adding value along the way? Is it the same as in the past? Is it adequate today? Who are my final users, my customers and my clients? Are they the right ones, the intended ones? Has your target audience changed? Are you missing some prospects? Is the process profitable to you at the level it should be, or am you just getting by?

Should you reinvent your business? The answer lies in the answers you gave to the above questions.

The Fort Bend Business Journal started in 1982 and through the years changed to meet the publisher's view of what should be changed. But Fort Bend County changed to one of the fastest growing suburban counties in the country. The businesses in the county changed. The raw materials (data), the products and services (news and information) and advertisers access to potential customers has changed. There is more competition. Should the Journal change? How does the Journal add value today? Examine the journals' mission statement today. The mission of the Fort Bend Business Journal is to provide valuable, meaningful and timely information to their target audience, the business readers, as well as providing advertisers access to the same target audience, all of this provided in an attractive, readable journal and at reasonable profit. That says it all. They know their products and services and their final user. They add value by creating, designing, printing and publishing a journal that is attractive and readable and delivering it to their final user, the business reader.

The marketplace changed. The way information is delivered has changed. The publishing industry changed in the way printing is done, the way color is used. Competition changed and the needs of their advertisers have changed, all of this indicated it was time to re-invent the Fort Bend Business Journal.

Are there other businesses that need to examine whether it is timely to reinvent themselves? Only the owners know, but at the rate it is happening in the business world; with mergers, new products, changing competition and added productivity, change is all around us. Perhaps not everyone calls it reinventing, but that is what it is.

If you feel things are changing too fast, the competition is crowding you, that you should be doing better but not sure how, that something is missing today that was there when you started, you may be a good candidate for starting anew while still operating. Review the definition of business, update your mission statement and your business plan and go forward with new energy and a profitable horizon.