5 Steps to take your business online

Over the past 30 years I have been continually helping organizations transform their businesses through the use of technology. I have helped the best and largest organizations in the world including Dubai Holding as CIO, Microsoft Corporation as Solutions manager and many other leading conglomerates. It is time or even an obligation now to share my deep knowledge and experience to help your business survive Covid-19 and grow. 

With the existing economic conditions, it is time, perhaps, to transform your business and go online. In this paper I show you how to successfully do that. Transforming businesses successfully has never been easy especially during difficult times. Below I share with you 5-steps to guide you in your online business transformation journey.

1. Define your business value proposition

A successful business starts by identifying an existing problem or market needs. Do not take it as granted and base your business on false assumptions. Make sure first to carefully identify and properly document what value your business needs to bring to the market. It is always true that a successful business starts with a good product or service. You may need to pilot test the market demand of what you are planning to sell. Doing a proper SWOT analysis for your products or services is a must to make sure you have enough opportunities to gain or enhance your competitive advantage. At this stage ask yourself questions that start with “why” as to why customers should buy your products or services and what if there are alternatives.

2. Design your business model

After clearly defining your business value proposition, you need to clearly define your business model. Your business model is the strategic approach you adopt to solving the problem you have identified by creating, delivering, and capturing value and how you would offer such value to your customers. The business model can be classical or fully technology based like the case of electronic commerce. 

Technology business transformation is represented by your company’s ability to extend its existing classical business model in order to better leverage technology to open up additional business opportunities. Many businesses fail at this stage as they may assume starting an online business happens naturally and without the need for a new business model.

For example, the major parts of a sales process in the case of brick-and-mortar business is different when doing business online. An online business needs brand new business processes and if you are to run classical and online business simultaneously, then careful consideration has to be put on integrating the online business processes with the classical ones in order to successfully establish what is referred to as omni-channel sales process. I can safely hypothesize that few companies in the region, even the large ones, succeeded in having a proper omni-channel sales model. In a proper omni-channel setup, all customer interactions are seamless disregards from where they happen and there is one centralized database repository of such transactions in order to track, and measure customer experience.

3. Have a business strategy

Your business strategy is your company’s plan to win. The business strategy involves many sub-strategies including the business model itself. We all remember how Google’s main source of innovations was its new business model. So, your entire business strategy includes how you plan to generate competitive advantage and win in the marketplace and that starts with your innovative business model. Your entire business strategy has to be cascaded down and include sub-strategies including your entire sales and marketing strategies. Your business needs to adapt to specific proven methodologies especially in the case of sales and marketing. For example, in online business, you may implement the inbound marketing methodology to automate the four stages of the customer journey and that includes branding, customer engagement, customer conversion, and customer retention. 

4. Technology strategy

Technology is the magic that will make all of your business run efficiently. Specific technology tools have to be identified and successfully implemented. Through my experience, many businesses may generate specific value proposition/innovation by having their own proprietary technology components in place. We all know Uber's main source of innovation through the use of their mobile app for booking a lift. Online business specific technology include an ecommerce platform such as Magento, or online customer or partner portals. All designed to automate the identified business processes and provide the best experience to customers. 

5. Conclusion

To Succeed in transforming your business, extending your classical business model, or establishing a new online business, you require to align all the above together. It is not rocket science, but it is tricky and requires good amount of knowledge and experience. Even if phase approach is used, specific plans of each phase of the business have to be well defined so that you begin with and end in mind. And one more thing, let's not forget the continuous improvements model with calculated risk at each move.

For feedback or any assistance required: You may contact the author:

Email: [email protected], Phone: Mobile +971 50 456 1197

About the Author

Imad Choucair is a researcher, C-level executive, and founder of Qinnovation. Being a doctoral learner, Imad’s latest research work focuses on applying technology to help design and operate a modern organization. Imad lectured in a number of large events and is continually driven by his passion to spread knowledge to create economic value.

Before starting his own company, Imad held many senior management positions in leading organizations including Microsoft, Dubai Holding, Midis Group, and SOLIDERE.

Imad holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from American University of Beirut (AUB) with three honors, Masters in Computer Science from Lebanese American University, and Masters in Business Administration from University of Liverpool. Imad is now completing his doctoral thesis in Business Administration. His dissertation research project is on alignment between business strategy and organization design for better business performance.

About Qinnovation

Based in Dubai Internet City, Qinnovation, www.qinnovation.ae, is the Middle East regional leader in designing and implementing cutting edge, custom technology-based strategies and solutions. Qinnovation’s solution offerings cover: Technology strategies, custom solutions, mobile app development, and digital marketing. Qinnovation’s portfolio of technology assets covers: Majority of open source technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), Blockchain and others.

Qinnovation has successfully completed 100’s of projects across the Middle East in various areas ranging from strategic consulting to actual implementations. Qinnovation selected a number of leading technology partners including HubSpot, and technologies from leading vendors including Amazon, Google, Apple, and others.