How can you improve your strategy?
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​To find out what you can improve in your strategy to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 3 and 6 to check your strategy and customer processes. Complete section 4 to check your execution. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.

In the previous 5 minute growth tip article, I wrote about how midsize companies can make more progress at implementing the processes and systems that will enable them to grow and grow profitably. But is it really progress if you’re not going in the right direction? And how do you know if you are going in the right direction?

While various common types of processes and systems are needed for any company to grow beyond their current level (see the first article in this series), some types of systems will need to be chosen (or tailored) specifically for that unique business AND to support and execute its unique strategy in the market.

Developing a clear strategy is not only important to making the right progress. It’s also important for ensuring a company is pursuing truly valuable growth opportunities.

This brief article will cover the basics of developing a successful strategy. From there, other tools and practices can be used to refine the strategy and make it more robust over time.

What is strategy?

First, let’s recognize what strategy is NOT. As Jack Welch once put it, “Strategy is NOT a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a CENTRAL IDEA through continually changing circumstances.” A list of projects, priorities or action items is not strategy. That’s an execution plan.

And what is this “central idea” Jack speaks of?

Over my 15 years facilitating strategy development, the simplest, most accurate description of strategy I have come across is from Michael Porter, the renowned Harvard Business School professor, researcher and consultant.

In his best selling book “Competitive Advantage”, Porter describes strategy succinctly as “a unique and valuable position in the market that involves a different set of activities from competitors”. 

Your “unique and valuable position in the market” is this “central idea”. And it needs to continually evolve to respond to changing circumstances. It describes the essence of the business you and your leadership team want to build. Your execution plan is how you’ll build it.

Brand Promise

Let’s look at what Porter calls a “position in the market.”

Put simply, this is about how your offering compares to competitors who offer the same or similar products or services. In the Scaling Up system and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, we use the term “Brand Promise”.

For most business leaders, like myself, it’s been drilled into our heads that our offering needs to be unique. Porter confirms that this is important for our positioning.

But why? To create customer loyalty. If our customers can only get our unique twist on a product or service from our company, and not from our competitors, they’ll keep coming back.

Hence the more traditional terms used for Brand Promise, including Unique Value Proposition, Unique Selling Proposition, Unique Offer, Competitive Advantage and Differentiation. They all essentially mean the same thing - a brief statement that describes how our product or service is or will be unique from our competitors.

One example is SouthWest Airlines. While they provide air travel services like so many other airlines, they have a unique brand promise: “Low Fares, Lots of Flights, Lots of Fun”. This combination of promises is unique in the American airline business.

Yet Porter’s definition means our brand promise needs to be more than just unique. It also has to be valuable. Valuable to who? Customers.

Core Customer

Value can be tricky. Because what’s valuable to one type of customer is not necessarily valuable to another. To make our brand promise valuable to a customer, we need to know WHO that customer is. 

Once we’re clear on who that customer is, we can define our brand promise, and then design our “different set of activities”, as Porter puts it, to consistently deliver that unique positioning.

Note that, if we are to do things differently than competitors to fulfill a unique brand promise for a specific type of customer, the number of different types of customers we serve has to be pretty small. Doing things in a number of unique ways that are each valuable to different types of customers becomes unprofitable, if not impossible, without sufficient scale. So for many companies, especially, midsize companies, that often means focusing in on one type of customer. We call them our Core Customer.

How do we identify our core customer? We examine our best customers! The ones who are the most profitable, the most loyal, the most likely to refer, the ones who pay on time.

In addition to knowing WHO are Core Customer IS, we have to know WHAT our Core Customer NEEDS. This enables us to then define a brand promise that will be valuable to them. Without understanding our Core Customer’s needs, we’re just guessing at our brand promise.

With clarity about who our core customer is, what they need and what brand promise would be valuable to them, we also want to make sure we can fulfill that brand promise. 

Maybe we aren’t fully set up right now to deliver on it. But we need to examine if we can get there. If not, we’ll be making a promise to customers that we just can’t keep. Customers will be disappointed and become less loyal, rather than more loyal, over time.

So, how do we know if we’re fulfilling our brand promise? With a brand promise metric. For example, with SouthWest’s promise of “low fares”, the company tracks all fares in the industry to make sure their fares are always the lowest.

Sandbox

The Sandbox defines what specific products or services we’re going to offer, where we’re going to sell them, and through who. Through direct sales? Online? Through distributors, affiliates or retail?

The Sandbox encourages us to proactively think through where our focus for growth needs to be over the next 3 to 5 years. It encourages focus also by proactively deciding to avoid products, geographies and distribution channels that will distract us. We may even choose to discontinue some we have right now.

Choosing our Sandbox involves making sure these “what?”, “where?” and “through who?” decisions align with 1) our core customer, 2) our brand promise, and 3) our understanding or estimates of what products, geographies and distribution channels will provide the greatest opportunities for growth and profitability.

SouthWest Airlines, for example, has determined that offering a first class service would not fit. It would take away from their “Lots of Fun” promise by treating some customers more lavishly than others. It would also increase complexity which would lengthen ground time, reduce the number of flights per day, ie. “Lots of Flights”, and therefore increase costs and affect their “Low Fares” promise.

Making it Work

The three basic elements of a successful strategy include:

• Identifying our Core Customer’s characteristics and true needs
• Defining a Brand Promise that is valuable to our core customer, checking that it’s feasible and setting a metric to track if we’re meeting it
• Setting our Sandbox to focus on the right products or services, geographies and distribution channels.

This basic strategy work will be most successful when aligned with four foundational pieces:

1. our core purpose (or our Why, as Simon Sinek calls it - the difference we want to make in the world beyond creating jobs and profit),
2. our vision (or Big Hairy Audacious Goal - BHAG - as Jim Collins puts it),
3. our 3 to 5 year strategic targets - including financial and non-financial numbers, and
4. an awareness and understanding of the trends unfolding in our market and the world. 

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And let's remember, as CEOs, we’re best off developing our strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, in order to achieve “efficient leadership team buy-in” that supports “accountability for execution” (as discussed in my previous article).
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From there, we can develop our one year and quarterly execution plan to bring our strategy to life. With the right leadership team members and the right culture, we can execute with efficiency and predictability.  AND, with the right leadership team members and culture, we are much more likely to develop a great strategy with that team. More about that in my next article.

As we’re now mid-way through the first quarter, I want to underline the importance of annual planning. 

Whether you don’t yet do annual planning, haven’t yet gotten to it for 2021, or want to improve, this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast by senior emeritus coach, and a mentor of mine, Ron Huntington in Seattle, Washington, goes over how to complete effective, rigorous and productive annual planning.
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In this 30 minute podcast, Ron paints a vivid picture of effective planning by applying his experience as a pilot to the discipline of getting a CEO and leadership team from where they are to their desired destination, as quickly and safely as possible.

The process and perspectives he shares mirror the planning I facilitate and coach leadership teams through annually. It’s a disciplined, rigorous, productive, yet tailored process that gets the whole senior leadership team clear on where they’re going and cohesively aligned and committed to how they’re going to get there.

And as the COVID-19 adventure continues, having a flight plan to not only survive - if your business has been negatively affected - but to also thrive, and make the best of the opportunities, is critical for organizations.

Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life?

​Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.

With our live virtual event with Jim Collins coming up next week (Feb 17, 2021), I thought it fitting that February's Book of the Month be Jim's most renowned book: Good to Great.

​For those new to this classic, here's an overview of one of THE best books on building a great company. And, for those who’ve read it, consider this a brief reminder of the insights from this in depth research.

Released in 2001, Good to Great studied what made 10 “great” companies great, compared to comparable companies Jim called "good". Greatness was defined by a minimum 20 years of growth and sustained financial success that far outpaced the market or industry average.

The book debunked a number of myths and identified 8 key factors to greatness:

1. Good is the enemy of great - the comfort of good enough gets in the way of putting in the effort to build a great company.

2. Level 5 leadership - in addition to ambition and determination, a level 5 leader is humble enough to exert their drive for the benefit of what they are creating, not for their own ego.

3. First who, then what - get the right people on the bus - on your team - before setting your strategy.

4. Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith) - believe you can prevail AND be realistic about what's happening and what's needed to get there.

5. Your hedgehog concept - compete successfully by playing only in the intersection of your three circles: what your passionate about, what you can be the best at and what drives your profit engine.

6. Culture of discipline - look hard at what to NOT be doing, including anything that strays from your hedgehog concept.

7. Technology accelerators - use technology not as a strategy in itself, but to enable and strengthen your competitive advantage.

8. The Flywheel - apply these concepts rigorously through small, consistent, aligned actions that reinforce each other and build momentum over time.
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We are forever grateful to Jim Collins for these fantastic research-based insights, which still hold to this day, and which the leadership teams we work with benefit from greatly.

Book: 320 pages. Audio book: 6 hours. GetAbstract summary: 5 pages or 10m audio.

Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life?
​
Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.