Fix your strategic foundation

If you want to improve your business, you have pretty much two main ways to go about it. You can “go strategic”, or you can “go tactical”.

Going tactical is when you deploy tactics to achieve an existing strategy or, let’s be honest here…do any kind of s***t you think will work to achieve a short-term gain (sometimes from a place of mild or severe desperation).

Today, I want to focus on giving you three crucial strategic “fixes” for your business. They are three sides of the same coin (eh..).

I mean, they need to work in perfect harmony to help you achieve the true potential of your business. All too often, companies are weak in one or two of them, and therefore they have to compensate by “row faster to compensate for all the leaks”.

Let’s look at them one by one. (I recommend self-assessing each of them).

Position

Your position is the spearhead of your strategy - it’s (loosely defined by me as) how you’d like to be perceived by customers (so they choose you), combined with how you will deploy your resources for making your competitive advantage come true.

The most common problems in these areas are:

+ You focus on way too broad of a segment (too many different customers).

+ You try to solve too many problems (serving too many needs).

+ Your positioning is “meh” or just too common, irrelevant, mediocre…

+ Your position is not aligned with your strengths, identity, and capabilities

+ You lack a position! (Agencies, let’s see a show of hands…) A great positioning will do a lot to compensate for poor branding and marketing…and it will help you get ahead so get it dialed in!

Whole Foods has a clear position, and so has Patagonia. Nike does, too. Adidas? Not so sure. Tesla, yes. Ford? Nah…

Offering

You would like your offering(s) and positioning to match and strengthen each other. Offerings build positions, and positions inspire offerings. Patagonia makes great clothes, but so do many others. But they stand for something that people care about.

Violate the position through the wrong offering, and you’re dead.

Ask yourself:

Is my offering addressing a real, relevant (and ideally urgent) pain or desire?

Why should my ideal client/customer choose you?

If you’re running a small professional service firm, chances are the ONLY answer is that you have the relationship that matters.

Attention owners of professional service firms (agencies included). This is your biggest vulnerability. You don’t have a real positioning and a differentiated, highly relevant offering, and you rely on personal relationships. Scary s***t! (Don’t I know it).

I just talked to three agencies within a few weeks who recently lost their biggest clients, and now they are going through hell.

Business Model

If you and I competed to get to the other side of the bay faster, and I started swimming as fast as I could while you rowed a boat, there was no way I could be as efficient and fast as you. There is simply no way I could beat you because you have LEVERAGE. I mean literally, that’s what oars provide you with.

In business, leverage is the name of the game (hence, my company is called The Simple Company - simplifying gives you oars. I mean, leverage. ? The same is true of business models. You can be the best brand strategist, barber shop, advertising agency, fisherman, clothing brand, or (insert any other category here)…and still lose to your competition.

With a poor business model, you have low leverage and fewer units of output per unit of input. To put it more bluntly (and less geeky), you’ll work your ass off for the rest of your life while having very little to show for it.

My advice?

Question the prevailing business model in your industry. Perhaps you’re selling “projects,” and you prepare endless amounts of proposals for each project. That’s a low-leverage model.

Go for leverage over everything! (How many times will he mention leverage, you wonder…)

What if you borrowed a model from another industry? What if you chose a business model that allowed you to achieve longer contracts, more predictable streams of cash from the same clients?

How would that change your life? I bet you’d have a more zen-like business.

I could go on forever about these foundational strategic areas, but I am running out of attention if I carry on much longer.

I hope you take a moment to think about how well you’re performing in these areas.

Don’t row a boat with leaks in it. Fix the leaks and use those oars for true le….(you know what) If you want help sharpening, or re-inventing your position, offering, and business model, just go here and share some info and book a call with me.

Until next time, be great. Tobias