We all make mistakes in our businesses - no surprise revelation bomb there.
Part of growing a business is constantly learning from past decisions. It’s about getting savvier about the information you collect so you can continue to serve your market well. Making mistakes in your business isn’t inherently bad though. It provides an opportunity to collect feedback, to adjust a product or service, or to get your business back in line with its values and mission.
Making mistakes gets to be bad for your business when they are constantly costing you dollars, goodwill and market share. Making lots of mistakes makes it harder for your customers to know, like, and trust the experience you are offering.
I can’t stop you from making mistakes in the future (I wish I could do that for me!) but, I can give you a little insight around the most common mistakes businesses make in terms of strategy. This post is going to walk you through some of the most common strategy mistakes and how to avoid them. My goal is to have you evaluate your entrepreneurial efforts and be able to actively recognize falling into any of these strategy blunders.
When you can see a strategy mistake coming you can work smarter to correct it and continue to move your business in the direction you want.
Common Strategy Mistakes
1. No strategy at all.
This is number 1 on the list for a reason. Having no strategy is the worst mistake you can make in your business.
Why?
No strategy means you are just arbitrarily making decisions about how you are bringing value to your customers and how you are deciding how to spend your time, money, or effort. It also means that you are only measuring broad business performance indicators like “sales” or “revenue”. Using those measure isn’t bad but when you aren’t measuring them for any part This is the same thing as hearing someone say that their strategy is, “to be the best”. It sends shivers down my spine.
When you have no strategy you allow your business to be subject to the ebbs and flows of every single consumer and you run the risk of wasting resources. How can you be competitive if you aren’t working on getting the most value out of your own time, money, or effort?
2. Getting your business or industry wrong.
As an entrepreneur you are probably really close to the work that you do. That’s awesome because that means you are committed to deliver as much value as possible! That makes defining the market you actually serve hard to identify - especially when every resource you read talks about the importance of identifying your perfect niche.
It’s important to take a step back and look at the market you serve in terms of the alternative choices your consumers have to engaging with your business. Here’s an example: if you are in the “paint and sip” business you aren’t just competing against other “paint and sip” businesses you are competing for all entertainment dollars. Consumers that spend $25 - $45 per ticket per person could also spend that money on: dinner and drinks, taking in a live show, going to an IMAX 3D movie, etc.
Being able to communicate your value and create strategies that will help you capture those entertainment dollars is what you should be focusing on - not what you think you direct competitor is doing (at least not all the time).
3. Are your strengths really your strengths.
Generally businesses fall into one of two buckets. They are either awesome at delivering the best experience possible for their customer or they are really great at delivering value as efficiently as possible. All businesses have to do a little bit of both but there are only so many resources that get to be divided up during the day.
You can’t focus all your effort on your customers and all your effort on being as efficient and as effective as possible. You can’t be all things to all stakeholders so you have to objectively evaluate your business and pick out your strongest capabilities. You can’t have competitive advantage if you are trying to be the best at everything all the time. Also if you still think, “trying to be the best” is strategy please go back and read the first point.
4. Listening to all your customers.
Feedback is an amazing tool for helping you and your business be as valuable as you possibly can. Making constant changes based on all the different feedback you are getting will wreak havoc on your business and on your strategy. Strategy, and your business, shouldn’t be about making everyone happy. Your business will find its best successes by choosing a very deliberate market to serve and then committing to serving that market well.
It’s really easy to get distracted when it comes to strategy because the allure of doing more to appeal to more with the hopes of earning more is a hard bias to shake. Lastly, if you are listening to every customer all the time how will you really be able to test anything in your business. It takes time to build interest and to get people to know, like and trust you.
Constantly changing parts of your business can send an inconsistent message to your customers - which does not bode well for building loyalty and advocacy.
Creating strategy and communicating it well throughout your business is hard enough already. Don’t make it harder by making these mistakes!