Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
10 Core Concepts in Building a Business 5-5-25
Mon, 05 May 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker shares ten core strategies for building a successful business, including the importance of focusing on niche markets, customer segmentation, team development, and more.
Chapter 1: What are the 10 core concepts in building a business?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is a slightly longer form podcast where we're going to discuss 10 thoughts on building a business. We hope you enjoy this talk. We'll have a discussion at the end on a place for giving us feedback, and we'd love to get your feedback.
Chapter 2: Why is niche-centric strategy crucial for businesses?
the first concept that we think about in building a business there's really three concepts i put at the very top of building a business and those are people and team centric customer centric and niche centric and a lot of these three concepts will overlap with a lot of things that we talk about later on in this discussion and podcast so the first concept is niche centric
It is far easier to build a business around a niche and keep on niching down than trying to build a business around the total addressable market around huge broad markets. I have a discussion later today with somebody who's building a consumer facing business versus a business to business business.
And I always think right away that that's harder than a business to business business with a discreet market. I've watched over the last couple of years the development of some of these niche conferences, most recently one called Shoulder 360.
And I love this example of just a hardcore niche where somebody's really building on a very, very specific niche versus trying to be broad and being everything to everybody. And that's a great example of niching down from orthopedics to a specific part of orthopedics where you really have a reason for being for a certain number of attendees and
and engage participants and potentially for device companies and companies that sell into that market. So this concept of shoulder 360 to me is a beautiful example of niching down. There's an old Jack Welch concept that you want to be first or second in your niche or not be in it with the concept that you really win in good times when you dominate a niche and you survive in bad times.
So I'm very, very big in this concept of niche centric and love this example of shoulder 360 as an example of it. That's not a Becker's healthcare property or anything else that we're related to. Second, customer centric. There's this whole concept of in business, Really making sure you wake up trying to make sure you're fitting a need of your customer.
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Chapter 3: How do you define customer segmentation in business?
You're really doing everything that customer needs to take care of what they need. And then you have to tier your customers. Some of the best examples of tiering customers I've ever seen are people that break their customers into five different quintiles. The 20% at the top may be the most profitable or the most revenues. The second 20%, again, the most profitable, most revenues.
The third is the third tier of that, then the fourth, then the fifth tier of it. And great discipline businesses are very good about really focusing on the first one or two tiers and really almost abandoning the fifth tier and looking at the third and the fourth tier as, to can they become A or B type clients or should we be serving them or not?
And then the concept is for your core customers, those are the ones that get your best people, the best ideas, the best engineering, the best everything, but very, very much focused on your best, best customers and understanding who are your best customers that really keep the lights on and really make the business go. The third thing we talk about, and we talk about this often is
Chapter 4: What is the significance of team development in business?
Every business has to be people and team staff centric. You have to build a great team and you ultimately probably have to tier your team as well to know who your best people are and to do everything you can to support and thrive and grow businesses around your top people and building lots of top people.
The best leaders I've seen have a mentality in building teams of they thrive and their people thrive. It's not a top-down type of matrix. It's a thrive-thrive culture. It's almost like a Venn diagram. How do I thrive? How do you thrive? And where's the intersection versus I thrive, you don't.
And the concept being if you want to develop people over the long run, it's got to be what we think of as a thrive-thrive environment with your people. The fourth thing we think about, and a lot of this comes back to niche-centric, is are you building a product or selling a service that people really need where you could identify the ideal customer for it?
Chapter 5: How can businesses identify their ideal customer profile?
Chapter 6: What strategies help in tiering customers effectively?
The third is the third tier of that, then the fourth, then the fifth tier of it. And great discipline businesses are very good about really focusing on the first one or two tiers and really almost abandoning the fifth tier and looking at the third and the fourth tier as, to can they become A or B type clients or should we be serving them or not?
And then the concept is for your core customers, those are the ones that get your best people, the best ideas, the best engineering, the best everything, but very, very much focused on your best, best customers and understanding who are your best customers that really keep the lights on and really make the business go. The third thing we talk about, and we talk about this often is
Every business has to be people and team staff centric. You have to build a great team and you ultimately probably have to tier your team as well to know who your best people are and to do everything you can to support and thrive and grow businesses around your top people and building lots of top people.
Chapter 7: How do successful leaders build thriving teams?
The best leaders I've seen have a mentality in building teams of they thrive and their people thrive. It's not a top-down type of matrix. It's a thrive-thrive culture. It's almost like a Venn diagram. How do I thrive? How do you thrive? And where's the intersection versus I thrive, you don't.
And the concept being if you want to develop people over the long run, it's got to be what we think of as a thrive-thrive environment with your people. The fourth thing we think about, and a lot of this comes back to niche-centric, is are you building a product or selling a service that people really need where you could identify the ideal customer for it?
There's so much discussed about the ideal customer profile. And this concept of the ideal customer profile, who's your ideal customer for your business, is so, so, so important. And you have to spend so much time on it if you want to do this right. You have to be in a spot where you can really identify who's the right customer for us. Like the Shoulder360 thing is a great example.
They know that the perfect customer is for shoulder 360 is a device company that sells shoulder devices. So it becomes very simple. Then they have to know who at the company is making the decisions as to where they spend their market spend. Similarly, they have to know who their target person is in the audience. Is it an orthopedic surgeon who deals with shoulders? I assume it is.
Is it a physical therapist that deals with shoulders or is it a hospital service that deals with shoulders? But really knowing your product market fit and really testing early. We talk often about the concept of companies is you have to be willing to commercialize early to try and test early whether your product's really needed and trying to identify this ideal customer profile.
I just love that concept. The fifth concept, and we talk about this a lot too, is scalability. Is there a spot where there is some scalability in the business where you can develop the systems, the processes, the people, that you're at some spot where revenue starts to come in regardless of adding more people?
So the private equity business, when it's going well, is the perfect example of a scalable business. You take a team of 20 or 50 professionals, Then you put literally billions of dollars over that that they're going to invest. So it's not a one-to-one ratio where every effort they put in leads to another output. It's rather... they could do bigger deals with the same numbers of people.
It's why in some ways when the media business is going great, we just love it because it's not like a legal hours business or a consulting business where every hour you put in leads to revenue. It's rather you've built a big enough platform and then people pay you for access to that platform. And it's not dependent necessarily on a direct correlation with more labor or technology cost.
So scalability is very important. The sixth concept we talk about often is clarity of goals. Do you have great clarity about what you're trying to accomplish, who you're trying to serve, what you're trying to build? Without that clarity, you spend so much wasted effort being all over the place versus being terrific. Seventh, we talk about this often as well.
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