Business Strategy - Page 3

Business Strategy Insight

To be able to set up, develop and grow a successful business, regardless of the industry ─ a good business strategy is vital. Whether you’re looking to set new business priorities, outline plans for growth, determine a product roadmap or plan your investment decisions, you’ll need a strategy. Most businesses start small and stay there.

But if that’s not good enough for you — or if you recognize that staying small doesn’t necessarily guarantee your business’s survival — there are examples of companies out there that have successfully made the transition from start-up to small business to fully-thriving large business. Coming to the realisation that your organisation needs one is easy. However, creating an actual strategy is a little trickier.

While it may sound a bit daunting, iterating like this actually makes strategy easier. It will save you from endless visioning exercises, misdirected SWOT (the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analyses, and lots of heroically uninformed big thinking. Crafting your strategy in relatively small and concrete chunks and honing the answers to the five questions through iteration will get you a better strategy, with much less pain and wasted time.

Questions to ask when building a business strategy:

• Why are you here?
• What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
• Who is your perfect customer?
• Why buy from you?
• What is your go-to marketing strategy?
• Who are you focusing on?
• What is your pricing?

In follow-up meetings to discuss your progress, it’s also important to revisit your action plan regularly and to continually update it. Allowing your action plan to be surpassed by developments in your company is a sure way for it to go above and beyond.