Approaches in making personal strategies.

Approaches in making personal strategies.

Honeygrow has approached several strategies that are intended to help make personal strategies. The strategies are aimed at enabling the company to attain a competitive advantage in the business. The main approach involves considering the feedback from the customers and use them to formulate an excellent strategy that will help make their services better. The business intends to create a customer-oriented strategy that will enable the company to retain them. The second approach will be goal-oriented. This will entail critically analyzing the goals and objectives of the company from now to the next three years and using that as leverage to formulate good strategies.

The intended planning approaches for the attainment of competitive advantage from now to the next three years will involve targeting and positioning. Targeting will enable the business to acquire customers that will help boost the profitability of the business. Positioning will enable the business to establish a perfect place for the business. The positioning approach will enable the business to present itself as one of the best catering business in the United States of America. These two approaches will help the company to win a lot of customers and increase revenue collection.

The Honeygrow vision is to work hard at work worth doing. This vision statement is made of two parts that help the business towards the attainment of their goal. The first part is that the company promises to work hard. Efforts and hard work are the core virtues that will ensure that the stakeholders perform their roles to ensure that the company attains their dreams. The second part is work worth doing, which depicts passion. The employees and the management at Honeygrow love the work that they do to ensure that customers are satisfied. This, therefore, means that they have a passion for what they do, which is a vital driver towards the attainment of competitive advantage.

The mission statement of Honeygrow is bringing people together over the highest quality, wholesome, simple foods. The mission statement has two main promises that the business promises the consumers. The first is that it will bring them together. This part of the mission statement focuses on the promise of promoting diversity among the customers and fostering good relationships such that no one will feel left behind. The second promise that the mission statement offers is high-quality, simple foods and services. The customers rest assured that the quality of food that they eat at Honeygrow will be worth every penny that they pay. This mission statement will help the company to attain a competitive advantage as there will be new customers, and old ones will be retained to the exemplary services that they will be receiving.

Analysis of internal and external contexts

Honeygrow is a catering business that offers simple foods and drinks to its customers. The business in 2018, made a great leap forward by venturing into ezCater platform. This platform the biggest marketplace where all leading catering businesses network with their customers, which is one of the biggest strengths of Honeygrow. Honeygrow is bound to benefit from the partnership with ezCater by helping it to gain access to numerous opportunities involving data and technology that was not there in the beginning. The data contained in ezCater will be helpful in helping Honeygrow position itself as the best catering business and target the desired market. The idea is already up and running, and its fruits are already visible. The business has already gained considerably high regard and reputation from the platform. Their customer rating and reviews are already high in the two locations that Honeygrow has its services.

Leveraging on the SWOT analysis, the company has already begun expanding its economic and environmental frontiers for the Boston expansion. The company has a reputation for its zeal and efforts to bring in new ideas in the market. The company has always showcased its willingness to stand out and find their blue ocean in a competitive world full of similar catering services. The company is willing to support creative and innovative ideas towards promoting their strategies and differentiation drivers. The company innovates new products and services that are exciting to the customers and ensure that they satisfy the dynamic customer tastes and preferences. Their partnership with the already established La Colombe Coffee will enable them to adapt to the market easily and establish their competitive advantage by helping them channel their resources and capabilities in improving their services.

Boston has a very low unemployment rate, standing a 2.1 percent as of 2019. The town also enjoys an increasing job market to the members of the public, which means that there are a lot of resources for Honeygrow to tap. The employed people living in Boston present the best segmentation for Honeygrow since most of them find making breakfast in the morning burdensome. Most of the workers in Boston are social workers and healthcare workers. This is a big opportunity for Honeygrow as they can segment the healthcare workers due to their consciousness in eating healthy foods.

People have generally adopted health living and are opting for health-conscious foods. Honeygrow can adduce this as an opportunity and start positioning itself as the best provider of healthy foods in the market. The business can use this opportunity to make the most out of advertisements depicting the foods that they are offering. Customers will be drawn towards the healthy diets that the catering company is offering, which will, in turn, give Honeygrow a natural competitive advantage. The many commuters and workers that have moved into Boston prefer healthy and fresh foods. This will give Honeygrow a boost in their customer acquisition and help them retain most of them. The energizing, fresh, and healthy variety of fast foods that Honeygrow offers will surely entice many people in Boston.

Most of the competitors in Boston do not offer as much variety as Honeygrow does. For instance, Flour is a breakfast restaurant that offers light foods such as yogurt and greasy foods. However, Honeygrow offers healthy and a variety of light breakfast foods that people are opting for in the current times. Dunkin, Bruegger’s Bages, and Boloco are some of the other competitors that Honeygrow would experience in the Boston market, but the advantage is that these restaurants just offer a conventional menu for breakfast, unlike Honeygrow. This trend exposes the demand that is in Boston for breakfast, such as the one Honeygrow offers. This is a big opportunity for Honeygrow to stamp their authority in the market and attain a competitive advantage.

Formulation: Strategy and competitive advantage

The analysis above is an indication that Honeygrow should match ahead and open a catering business in Boston. The business will be testing the market to find if the opportunities will work for the good of the breakfast catering. Honeygrow, though, needs to make changes in some of their policies, such as the opening hours. Opening at 6 am. will attract more customers as that is the time when most people wake up to go to their respective workplaces. The breakfast catering will use the opportunities to establish a good reputation in Boston, which will result in a rise in the number of customers that will be willing to eat their breakfast at Honeygrow. Honeygrow can use its partners, La Colombe Coffee, to help them gain more knowledge of how the consumers behave, in terms of choices in their consumption. This way, Honeygrow can adjust their menu to suit the demands of the customers, therefore, bettering their reputation. These strategies will help them gain a competitive advantage in the town.

After critically analyzing the catering industry at large, there are a lot of gaps that can be sealed, especially in breakfast catering. Most of the breakfast caterings do not balance between cost and quality to deliver what the customers demand. Honeygrow is, however, combining the two to come up with perfect services that customers will enjoy. These values are important to the growth and attaining of competitive advantage for Hoenygrow. The business can use the positioning approach to establish itself as a breakfast catering that combines both quality and cost to bring the best food choices for its customers. The employees should be at the forefront to help the breakfast catering achieve this goal by working according to the values of the restaurant. Sluggish performances and lack of punctuality should be dealt with to maximize the morning orders from companies and football fans.

When paying a closer look at the partnership between Honeygrow and ezCater, the former can gain a lot of exposure in the breakfast catering industry. Customers at exCater create information that Honeygrow can use to understand the dynamics of the catering market and the preference of customers. The partnership with La Colombe Coffee is useful in determining what customers in Boston prefer for breakfast. The two partnerships are very vital in the positioning of Honeygrow as a leading provider of healthy and fresh breakfast options to its customers.

Implementation

The organization structure at Honeygrow makes it possible to be efficient and innovative. Breakfast catering has a structure that is divided into functional areas like brand and marketing, operations, and accounting. This structure is very effective in organizations like Honeygrowas. It results in the generation and flow of ideas across all the ranks of the organization. Honeygrow is an organization that includes all the stakeholders in the running of the organization, and employees can also contribute to the running of the organization by generating and proposing creative and innovative ideas. The exponential growth in the breakfast catering industry requires Honeygrow to maintain that functional structure due to its innovative edge, which is a requirement in attaining a competitive advantage in the market.

Honeygrow should also focus on changing some aspects of its culture in a bid to attain a competitive advantage. The organization’s culture determines how things are done there. Culture includes, but not limited to, values and norms that the management and the employees hold. The breakfast catering is already valuing a culture of hard work and integrity, but also need to adjust to cope with the new challenges that will arise from the new market. The first change that Honeygrow will need to employ is changing its menu and adjusting it to meet the demands of the new customers in Boston. The culture of Honeygrow is not far-fetched from what is needed in survival in Boston, and they, therefore, need to make little adjustments to enable them to fit into the market.

Some of the stakeholders will pose some resistance to the implementation of the strategies. Employees are the ones that are most likely going to pose resistance in the implementation. The change of culture is a big change that will affect most, how the employees work. For instance, Honeygrow will require that employees turn up earlier than usual at their respective posts. Some of them will be resisting the move due to their usual culture of laxity. Some of the members of the management may also be unwilling to maintain the organizational structure with the idea of trying a new structure to see how it will work in the new market.

Part B

This project has worked as an investment in my journey towards my vision in the industry. The case analysis has been fruitful in helping me become more involved in the industry of my interest and learn how things get done. The project has provided me with an experience that will help me solve daily challenges in my future endeavors in the industry. The SWOT analysis, in particular, has helped me to grasp a lot of content on how the business environment of this industry works. I have learned the requirements for competitive advantage and how to organize the business. Taking part in this project has added value and knowledge in my professional capital.