Skills and capabilities

Once you've identified your initial offering to customers, you've got to determine the skills, knowledge, processes, and relationships you need to be successful in your intended business. When combined, skills, knowledge, processes, and relationships make up a capability. 

It takes skills to make the core processes and the supporting business and information infrastructures operational. As you plan your business, create a list of the skills you'll need to launch your business.

There are certain skills every business needs to be successful, including the ability to:

• Align your individual customer's personal needs and wants with the set of needs and wants your business uses to define its value proposition
• Understand and implement the business and information infrastructure needed to support the core processes
• Develop and manage external relationships for mutual benefit
• Obtain needed resources

You can develop capabilities in two ways. Either build them internally or buy them as a service from someone else.

In start-up mode, you're better off doing most things yourself so that you learn the ropes. But you also need speed and agility.

For example, if you want to let people register for your kick-off seminar on the web, you'll need that capability on your web site. Should you take the time to develop the capability yourself or purchase it ready to go from a firm that already offers online registration as a service? You get to interact with customers more quickly if you purchase the capability ready to go.