Chrissy breaks down her primary and supporting activities into two lists.
Chrissy’s primary activities include:
- inbound — buying ingredients from the local farmers’ market every week
- operations — baking bread and cakes, making sandwiches
- outbound — selling food and drinks
- marketing and sales — letting the café’s Facebook followers know about the latest treats
- post-sales service — for example, Chrissy has recently started a loyalty card scheme.
Chrissy's supporting activities include:
- infrastructure — keeping the café décor fresh and taking care of the banking
- human resources — hiring through word of mouth and training employees
- technology development — keeping the website updated and maintaining the café’s social media presence
- procurement — making sure she’s getting the best long-term deal on supplies.
Chrissy understands she can’t compete with bigger cafés on things like marketing or technology. Chrissy finds out from social media that customers love her cakes. Chrissy has a chance to improve her business by focusing on her supplies and operations.
Chrissy discovers that her supplier from the market is located nearby, and she enters into a long-term deal to get supplies at a discount. Chrissy starts customising cakes, taking ideas from her loyal customers on Facebook. Her big competitors can’t do this because their strategy is based on providing standard cakes.
Chrissy’s sales of cakes double in the next month, and she gets 20% more customers enrolled in her loyalty programme.