What is your core business?

What exactly is your company’s core business? While I certainly can’t answer that question for you, I’ve come across the mindset that a certain business is not part of the company’s core. As an example, someone might say that a restaurant is in the food business and that real estate is not a core part of the business.

I think what I’m about to say is really dependent on your definition of core so I’ll try to explain what I mean by it. I see as being core every activity that might meaningfully influence your success as a business. It follows from that definition that I find businesses that require more than a handful of people to have people management as a core and that sales is an actual core of every business. I’d also argue that, in my previous example, a restaurant with a physical store needs to see real estate as a core part of business.

I think this definition is important because, as a technologist, I’m annoyed when someone from a company whose online presence (read website) is their single means of contact with it’s clients says that technology is not a core business. I understand that they mean their business is not concerned with selling technology but technology is the reason that business exists at all.

An amazing example of this is Amazon. Amazon is clearly an online retail company but it has made incredible accomplishments, in great part by embracing a technology orientation. In fact, pursuing that orientation has allowed it to break into (and lead) new business fields, of which its cloud offerings and the Kindle products are an example.

My beef with all of this is mostly about technology, of course, but what I mean is that it is too easy to consider something as a secondary part of your business and forget the implications that it has. Nowadays, running a business is a complex endeavour and clear definitions are hard to find, so every company should keep itself open to change and to realize that, sometimes, something that wasn’t important a while back might be as important, or more than, the current status.


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