Screw Strategy, Just Go for It!

Strategy should be an afterthought as a startup.

Because at the beginning stages of any business, there is no real strategy. You simply don’t know enough. There's only, just f**king go and figure it out. Strategy on the other hand is about the enhancing or tweaking of a current plan to gain more revenue or customers i.e. taking steps towards your north star. Steps that can only happen when you have something that exists already or you have something to keep referring back to.

If you're a startup, then it's not a strategy. You're just guessing the right way to go. Trying things out. You're assuming so much that you can't call it a strategy. Maybe a better name for it would be a plan, but still, it’s not a business plan. In those first few months or even years, you’re essentially finding and breaking down new opportunities that take you one step closer to your why.

And it's more important to focus on your why first rather than your strategy because you need to get it out there and your?Why ?will inform your how and what moving forward.

Build Your Strategy As You Go

What I’m saying here is your strategy builds as you learn how to deal with or prepare playbooks to defend the things in and out of your control. That's a strategy i.e. how are you going to deal with it when you get copycats? Or when you discover an audience is behaving differently than the others.

When these things happen, those are the times when you're starting to strategize your business. It’s key you keep the readiness to deal with this and adapt the strategy as you go. As well as an adaptable mentality with the team that confidently keeps the bus moving forward.

Strategy is a buzzword in a startup which can easily distract a founder, making them lose sight of the foundation-building work which is required to scale and build a proper road to the founder's vision. The keyword here is ‘start’ aka ‘to start up’. People miss that point often. A start-up truly knows nothing of its strategy, only of its idea. Strategy comes in when you have something to look back on because when you don't have a clear trend or pattern to track winning solutions in the market, you're simply guessing and then testing. You need a foundation to rinse and repeat on.

Measure = Strategy

Most start-ups, as they continue to guess and test, rarely set up this process of measure, rinse, and repeat. And this is where they really struggle to get the actual intel back into the business and analyze it. So they're just testing on repeat, not learning anything, and through this, they often burn a lot of capital, fast. They don't have the talent or team to look at that data to see what it did or what channel was the best performing.

Strategy starts to happen when start-ups start needing to hire strategic thinkers and people whose role is to think of it from that lens, because if you have nothing to baseline or measure, then how can you make strategic assumptions or goals? Before that, you're simply aiming in the dark and hoping for something to stick. When a company needs direction, it needs a strategy that is developed by a leadership team and/or the founder.

Strategy Starts in the Gut

In the beginning, the only data you have is often the founder’s gut instinct. Even to this day, this is where so much of the strategy for SalonScale begins. With a gut instinct to try something specific, and once there’s data from that idea this informs the strategy itself.

For instance, I’m embarking on a data reporting project, but right now, it's kind of an instinct that I’m basing the direction of the project. To me, it'll become strategic once we do our first report and we know what works. Then it becomes strategic thought.

Founders are important for this kind of big-thinking strategy because when you're on a team created for strategic thinking, it will probably be more like day-to-day strategy. They’re the ones bringing the big vision into action, but they can be led astray easily. In this sense, if you as the visionary have them looking too far into the future, it can distract the team that is planning today's problems.

Work Backwards from the Strategy

Founders need to work backward from their strategy. As a visionary, you need to think, what are we going to do in these quarters to accomplish these goals that unlock one step closer to the strategy? And ensure the rest of the team is in on the plan. You have to remove the barriers from the team to accomplish these things. If you're too excited as a visionary, or you talk about strategy too much, you're taking all the planners from accomplishing this and you're putting them into a conversation that is focused too far in the future, and away from the strategies already set.

You need strategic thinkers who can break down the future strategy and create the building blocks. Who knows what needs to be done without getting swept away in the story of it? Otherwise it’s just ideas on ideas and ideas on ideas. If all of the team talked about different ways of doing the project, you would be on calls for hours. You need strategic thinkers, who can be like, ‘Okay, here's the concept. How do we start?’ to cut through the noise.

That’s the power of a strategic thinker versus a generalist.

In start-ups, you often have a lot of generalists before you have specialists. And those generalists are going to think that they're strategists. This is when ‘strategy’ can get in the way of just starting and doing in a start-up.

Focus on where you’re at

So you have to focus on where you're at. And then you need to learn that's where communication is so important. Visionaries can be shitty communicators because they live so much in the vision and the future, that when they come back to the steps, the steps feel overwhelming because they’re full of detail compared to the broader vision they’ve been working with. It's an expansion and a contraction mind all at the same time. Meaning when they come back to the present and the detail needed to get to their future is so different, they start to rush.

Saying, what about this? What about that? Make this etc. Getting these bursts of ideas but the team isn’t ready for them yet, and without writing them down these ideas can get lost. This is where documentation becomes an absolute must with a visionary. You have to have something that marks what you've done and where you’re going next. Otherwise, it gets lost or the timelines get confused.

The documentation keeps the expectation of when that thing is going to happen. So not only are the visions being held, but the plan is being enacted too. It calms the visionary's brain because they know the plan is unfurling, and they can focus on the future vision.

Document it, delegate it, date it!

If you're a visionary and you want to just go quickly, you have to document and delegate. There's just no way around it. You're going to not remember things. You're going to go from engineering over to marketing and then be like, why didn't you get this done? Well, it's because you didn't document it or say, I need a date. Document, delegate it, date it. You need a date as to when it will happen. If you don't have a date on it then no one knows how to prioritise it. You don't just say, we're going to get married someday. You know when you plan to marry, even if it's just the year in which you want to do it at first.

Patience must also be found, because the bigger the company gets, the longer these projects take. As the strategy and the company grows, you're probably not as much into the micro-projects anymore. You're in the bigger projects. The strategy will take longer to come to fruition, and that’s why it’s important to bring in the right people to translate your vision into a plan and to move that plan forward.

The connecting bridge is those key players.

An Olympic athlete will have a coach of course, but they will also have a nutritionist, a trainer, and a manager. They have their team behind them to bring the vision to life. So it is very, very irresponsible as a leader to think that you're going to do all this on your own. I have a mental health coach, two different business coaches, a Head of Personal PR, and an executive assistant. All helping me to ensure the strategy I envision comes to life.

Going from that startup to scale up, going from founder to CEO. So don't focus on strategy first, just go for it and the strategy will come.