You are a business owner. You work relentlessly to take care of your customers and grow your company.

 You think you are doing pretty well, but you keep reading articles about the importance of being an innovator in your business. “An innovator? Hah! That’s not me,” you scoff. “I just run an accounting firm (or a roofing business or a paperclip manufacturing company).” So you keep plugging away, inching along doing what you do, never realizing an essential truth.

Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means.

Innovation isn’t always some grand discovery or breakthrough technology. For small business owners, what innovation is really about is simply finding ways to run a better business.

Disruptive vs Sustaining Innovation

We hear about Disruptive Innovation all the time. Steve Jobs launches a technology empire from his garage. Elon Musk builds a reusable rocket booster. Netflix creates a subscription model that makes movie rental stores obsolete. By definition, Disruptive Innovation turns an industry on its ear. And if you need to read that definition, then Disruptive Innovation is maybe outside your wheelhouse.

Sustaining Innovations, on the other hand, are internal advancements that improve a business’s workflow, technology, processes, and procedures. Sustaining Innovation is generally not designed to take the world by storm or put the competition out of business, but rather to enhance the way one runs and grows their business.

The Need for Business Innovation

You as a business owner might not be the next big Disruptor, but you are indeed uniquely qualified as an expert in your business. You know what works. You know what doesn’t work. You know what is slowing you down and you know what is dampening growth. You know a lot. But the catch-22 here is that you don’t know what you don’t know. And those blind spots can be major obstacles on your path to business success. What might surprise you is that the operational obstacles you are experiencing as a small business owner are shockingly similar to almost every other small business out there, regardless of industry.

Issues like sluggish HR and inefficient hiring.

Cash flow, finance, and accounting problems. Lack of a strategic vision. An unattractive company culture. None of these things have anything to do with your industry expertise; but overcoming them has everything to do with the long-term success of your business.

And in all likelihood, there are other business owners geographically close to you that have already leveraged innovation to solve the same issues that are dogging your company.

Learn from Other Business Owners’ Innovation

TAB Business Advisory Boards provide practical advice on the challenges surrounding small business ownership and growth.

 Boards are made up of a select

group of up to 10 local business owners who run non-competing businesses, as well as a TAB Board facilitator. Most TAB Boards have more than 200 years of collective executive experience in small business ownership, solutions, and leveraging innovation. TAB Board Members support and elevate each other with real-world experience and operational insight into what has worked for them.

While being an innovator certainly has its merits, gleaning expertise from small business owners who have already walked in your shoes is an invaluable asset to your business. Innovation you leverage in your business does not need to be of your own making. It just needs to make sense for your unique needs.

And chances are a fellow TAB Board Member has already figured it out for you.