Businesses with greater clarity and direction always have a better chance of thriving in any economy. Here are five decisions you can make to give you greater clarity and direction:

1. Decide to focus on your best customers. Make all internal decisions with your best customers in mind. Your best customers hold the key to brand loyalty. Uncover who they are. This can take great effort—and a whole lot of listening, but this special group represents the key to your long-term profitability.
2. Decide to focus on building a highly functional team. Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team will help you identify the roadblocks inherent in team building and show you how to break through them.
3. Decide to grow from within. A company with a strong culture has a significant competitive advantage (just ask Google, Apple, Zappos or Netflix). Cultivate an inspiring work environment that breeds a unique culture aligned with core values. Remember: Your business’s culture reflects the overall image your brand represents to your customers.
4. Decide to be the best at something. This decision requires sacrifice and focus. Jim Collin’s Hedge Hog concept is a good one. Find the intersection of the answers to these three questions:  (1) What are you passionate about? (2) What can you be the best at? And (3) What drives your economic engine?
5. Decide on a more compelling future for your organization to rally around. Obsessive focus on your competitors will consistently deteriorate your business. And simply achieving your revenue goals isn’t going to inspire anyone. Zappos is striving to deliver happiness to its customers. What is your organization committed to creating or becoming?

Any one of these powerful decisions can transform your business, but they are not mutually exclusive. Want to ensure success and catapult your business into a new stratosphere of long-term profitability? Commit to all five of these powerful decisions.

Related posts:

1. The Human Side of Business
2. The Purpose of Business
3. The Business Metric That Matters Most

1999: Selection (of shoes)
2003: Customer Service
2005: Culture and Core Values as their Platform
2007: Personal Emotional Connection
2009: Delivering Happiness

Several key take-aways for smart business people:

1. A strong brand is constantly evolving, but not changing directions. This is critical. You probably don’t want or need to re-invent your brand, but you also can’t be stagnant. (It’s also interesting to see how a brand’s logo can evolve over time.)
2. Strong brands tend to move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Zappos continues to move in a more humanistic direction. They’ve always been about people, but now they are moving upward to a more meaningful connection with their customers and employees. Delivering happiness is a tall order, but simply holding that intention will create new opportunities to wow their customers and employees and lead to greater loyalty.

For anyone interested in the power of brand loyalty and how to build a business for the long-term, Zappos is an ideal company to study. Zappos demonstrates that many of the intangible qualities of business like values, culture and willingness are more important than many transactional-oriented executives care to believe. Otherwise, why would anyone care about a shoe e-tailer? And how could they grow by approximately 7,800% annually for the last nine years?

Related posts:

1. How Do You Achieve a 62,400% Growth Rate?
2. Four Signs That Your Brand Has High Integrity
3. Five Powerful Decisions to Transform Your Business