Successful companies like Google, Amazon, and Tesla have one thing in common: a solid, robust business strategy that helps them achieve their goals. As a CEO, Founder, or Entrepreneur, having a clear business strategy is critical to the success of your organization.
In this blog post, we’ll be discussing how to have a strong business strategy that will help you grow your business profitably, scale it, and move to the next level.
A Business Strategy: What It Is and Why It’s Important
A business strategy typically consists of three elements: the company’s business objectives, information about its target market, and strategic management plans for all areas of the organization. These three elements work together to ensure that the business is in a position to achieve its goals in the short and long term.
Having a business strategy is important because it helps align the wider mission statement and the idealistic direction and goal of the company with the realities of everyday operations. It provides a real-world plan that helps the company move towards its ultimate goals, while allowing it to be measured against to track success.
Building a Strong Business Strategy
To build a business strategy that works for your organization, you need to have a complete understanding of your business, products, and market position. This requires an objective and neutral view, and a strategy that aligns everything with your values and long-term vision.
Step 1: Identifying Your Core Values and Long-Term Vision
The first step in building a strong business strategy is to decide on the core values of your business. You need to set your destination before you can think about how to get there. To do this, think about the problems or pain points that your product or service aims to solve. This will help you determine your end goal and your company’s vision for the future. From there, you can begin to set out clear values and key markers that you want your company to have or hit to support achieving your long-term vision.
Step 2: Analyzing Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT Analysis)
Once you have your vision for the future and your values in place, it’s time to take a hard look in the mirror and take stock of what you have. Analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) that your business currently faces. Do you have enough human resources to take the next steps on the business’s journey? Do you have adequate cash flow in place? Do you have an advantage in the current market or see an opportunity to build an advantage over your competitors? Or are there threats, internally or externally, that could derail your plan before it’s even in place? It’s crucial to be as impartial and neutral as possible during this step and to be honest with yourself.
Step 3: Defining Your Target Market
At its core, your strategy needs to set you apart from the competition and help you deliver unique value to your customers, which will help you grow. It’s time to define who or what your target is and how your strategy will bring them the additional value you want to deliver. Is your target a more generalist audience or would you be better served to target a more specific niche? This will dictate the direction of your business strategy.
Step 4: Create Your Team
Once you’ve got the first few foundational steps done, it’s time to start putting things into action. You need a team, and not just any team, it has to be a group of people that are right for the job of coming up with the winning strategy and then implementing it across your business. The strongest teams are usually made up of members of upper management who can set the goals and targets right at the top, middle management who can help implement this across their teams and oversee the execution of the plan, and also the operators who are providing your service or selling your product, for the strategy to work, input from top to bottom is vital and they may have a better understanding than anyone else of your service or product.
Step 5: Pulling It All Together
Now, you’ve got your team, you have your vision and you’re ready to start putting a strategy together. Before you go any further though, it’s probably a good time to do a little research, and find some successful businesses in your sector or a similar sector to the one you operate in. Look at the success they achieved, and then look at how they made it happen. How they grew their share in the market, brand awareness and profit-making capabilities is a great place to borrow from, but also how they did so whilst keeping their workforce happy and productive. You can often find interviews or webinars with board members or upper management professionals from successful businesses and take it from there. You shouldn’t feel guilty for borrowing from someone else's playbook for success. After all, they probably built theirs by looking at success elsewhere and listening to other businesses too.
It’s finally time to take all of that knowledge and the team of experts from across your business you’ve put together and get to work on the strategy, at last! This is where you will need to set out the goals of your strategy, but make sure you space them out at realistic intervals. You’re going to push your organization to be the best at everything it can be, but you have to make sure you set goals that can be realistically met, there’s no point in setting targets that can’t be reached or measured here, you have to sometimes start small too. Over time you will be able to develop balancing the ambition of your business and the ability your organization has to get there. This balance is essential to having a long-term plan, rather than just plotting for the near future, and making sure you’ll be around to fulfil it. Businesses that try to achieve too much too soon often fail. It’s crucial to plan for the long term, and not just quarter to quarter, but to have that shorter term timeline in mind as well.
Flexibility is key too, over the last few years that has never been truer. Things can change overnight, as the COVID pandemic taught us, and whilst your plan should be concrete, you have to make sure that it can flex around those day-to-day changes as they happen. Business has to adapt to survive, and this should never be in spite of the plan you’re working to. The end goal should always stay the same but be prepared to react and change the plan if you need to, to reflect changes to external factors.
Next, it’s time to filter down those goals and targets through to every part of the business by amending the goals, targets, KPI’s and cultures throughout the company to are all aligned with the new business strategy. After all, there’s no point in having the strategy in place at the top of the organization if it isn’t being followed down to the base level, as this will make it significantly harder to hit the goals and targets you’re setting, if not impossible. Send the strategy to stakeholders throughout your business, asking for their feedback. This can not only sometimes highlight something that’s missing from your strategy or something you haven’t thought of, but also build trust and positive culture throughout, showing you value every level of the company and see everyone as being on the same team. If you do this, it will be so much harder to lose focus of the strategy and your core values as a business. Want to learn more? Watch our videos on YouTube
In conclusion, a strong business strategy is crucial for CEOs, Founders, and Entrepreneurs. It helps align your business objectives with your vision, delivers unique value to your customers, and sets you apart from the competition. If you're looking for consultancy and mentorship to help your business grow and scale let's see if we can help by emailing support@scalinggrp.com