How To Create Better Strategy By Going Simple

Being “disruptive” at it’s core is about simplification. Getting to outcomes or results more simply by better using the resources you have around you, by creating more efficient processes or a little bit of both. Disruption is all the rage these days in startups all over the world. There are books dedicated to teaching you to innovate in disruptive ways and conferences that pull entrepreneurs and programmers together to celebrate and showcase how markets are disruptively evolving. There are companies pitching for investor dollars everyday because they’ve thought up tricky ways to deliver value to customers in markets that have been stagnant for decades - think Uber.

You’re not Uber though (yet). So why should you care about disruption?

Thinking in terms of disruption is very good for running your business. The best part of thinking disruptively is that it doesn’t cost much and you don’t need a fancy set of tools to implement it well. In this blog post I outline three tips to help you get to simple so you can get more out of your strategy and your business.

Think simple for your next attempt at a strategy you want to try out. Running a business successfully means managing a lot of moving parts, there is no getting around that. Lots of running parts often leads people to think that there’s too much complexity to try to navigate around. I’m encouraging you to think about the parts of your business that you can simplify by a step or two. What are the processes you wake up and start in on everyday? At any time any one process might be a positive thing but look at what those singularly good processes are doing on the entire company. Are they slowing things down? Making it hard for information to flow or for decisions to get made? Besides trying to simplify how you do business, which could conceivably reduce your resource burn, how you position your brand and what you stand for also doesn’t have to be complicated. Think simplicity and act like 37Signals.

If you aren’t familiar with 37Signals (now officially just Basecamp) they are a firm that not only puts out amazing software but has published a few really rockstar entrepreneurship books. (One that I re-visit daily is ReWork.) What makes them simple lies in their product offerings: Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire. Each of these SaaS product offerings are very specific and very simple in their functionality.  I want to highlight Basecamp in particular. It’s SaaS business that is built around one thing project management. If you go to their website today you’ll see that they are pivoting their model yet again. They are going all in on Basecamp. They are taking their already simple model and drilling down to get really good at one thing. Project Management.

37Signals is an awesome example of how a business can cause innovative disruption, continue to differentiate themselves, and succeed. ( I swear this isn't a plug, just really like their model.) This is also not the only thing I want you to take away from this post - I want you to walk away with some tips on simplifying your strategy and finding success.

1. Start with the why.

This one is a little introspective but seriously, why are you in business. The more honest you can be about what your business does, the better. Stop trying to do everything. I did that once and I burned myself and a few relationships out. No bueno. When you can craft a story behind the motivation of why you are in business it not only helps your stakeholder’s relate to what you’re doing but it helps to make decision making in the future just a little easier because you have a story compass to follow.

2. Boil down to what matters most in your business.

What are the most critical functions within your business. What needs to happen every time so that a customer is delivered an amazing experience. Focus on flushing those out and simplifying them as much as possible. There is so much bloat in even small companies these days because firms are trying to hard to be the all providing problem solving experience for the customer. That suffocates your “why” and your mission and makes it harder for your key processes to work efficiently.

3. Fight wanting to do more.

I don’t mean get lazy what I do mean is flex your “no” muscle. As the economy continues to recover and expand it will be tempting to want to reach out to new markets or offer up complimentary products or services. It will sound great and you might even produce data that would support chasing customers in a new segment but you should fight that urge. Instead focus on being the best you can be at a few core competencies, offer more value, innovate, and reduce costs. Work on serving your clients and customers the best way that you can. This will keep you from feeling overworked, spread too thin, and help to keep you from wasting resources. If Google can and did unload Motorola to Lenovo that has to create some kind of social proof right?!

Simplify doesn’t mean easy and it doesn’t mean lazy. It means serving very specifically and very intensely to a focused market. When you do that you create opportunities to differentiate in a way that makes it very hard for rivals or competitors to match because you cultivate a depth of understanding and relationships that someone just strolling into your market won’t find. There are a lot of programs that do way more than Basecamp and I’ve tried them - only to hate them and make my way back to a software that is easy to use, has awesome customer services, and always does what I expect it to do. Make your business do that in your industry and you will have no problem being as successful as someone like 37Signals.

3 Tips To Creating Strategy That Works

There is such a thing as too much strategy. Way too much. 

There is so much advice on the web about creating strategy. Lots of frameworks, lots of fill-in-the-blank plans and LOTS of generic advice that you write down but never really know how to implement.

I hate it.

So in this post I’m not going to give you a dashboard to work through or some one-page cheat sheet. That’s not to say that I’ll never do that or that it’s not helpful to have guides but today is all about getting to real progress quickly. This post is going to teach you the three most important things to think about when you are crafting your business strategy or you are trying to make decisions about what you’re going to do to get your business growing.

1. Focus on an identity. You need to get crystal clear on who you are, who you serve and why it’s important. When you focus on your identity it takes the pressure off of just focusing on generic growth targets and ideas.

Here’s real life, when you focus on generic growth you are inclined to do all the growth oriented things everyone else is doing. Which eventually just turns into stuff that looks like work. That means you’re thinking about making things more cheaply, trying to chase more of your market or even thinking about your next product/service offering based on the ebbs and flows of your competitors actions and consumers changing tastes. All that stuff takes time, energy and money that could be better spent by better honing in on who you are, why you are valuable and doing the work that only your business can.

When you focus on your identity all kinds of fun things fall into place. First, you better align yourself and your actions with your value proposition. This is a big deal because it re-enforces everything from how you make decisions in your business to how you deliver value to everyone outside of your business. Next everyone that interacts with you, buys from you or is in your audience better understands what you’re great at and why that sets you apart - in business-speak it’s your clear system of capabilities.

Lastly, focusing on your identity allows your audience or customers the chance to really fall in love with who you and your business are. It better allows you to create and foster an authentic relationship with them. You need that trust because it’s in that relationship and your differentiation that will keep people around and hungry for the work that only you and your business can do.

2. Strategy needs to be everyday. Strategic plans can sometimes be these big silly, overly complicated documents that you write and then instantly deviate from because it’s focusing on what you think you’re idea of your business is versus what you’re actually doing every day. Setting goals, figuring out what’s important to measure and having benchmarks are all great things - just make sure they reflect the work you are actually doing. When you’re building a strategy for everyday you don’t want to focus all of your energy on the big pie-in-the-sky stuff, you want to focus on what little things. Get really clear and focus on a small number of things that you do well and work on getting even better at them. (These are those pesky capabilities again.) Those activities is the heart of the work that you’re doing that ultimately reflects your values and reinforces your value proposition. You want to outline in detail the stuff you’re great at so that your employees or even virtual assistants can without any question replicate the experience you’re working to create for your customers.

If you’re not growing or don’t have any virtual assistants that’s ok too. You still want to do this stuff because it will help keep you focused and accountable to the work that matters as you’re growing your business. It’s definitely not a secret that there can be lots of distractions at any given moment in your business. As your business grows or iterates there will be lots of small changes so you want to make sure that you are keeping an eye on the stuff you’re trying so that you can pinpoint the stuff that works and continue to develop that.

3. Cutting costs helps you grow stronger. I know, sounds a little cliche but hear me out. Businesses that do the best jobs at closing the gap between what they planned to do and what they are really doing are businesses that have a near superhuman stranglehold on their expenses. I’m not going to tell you that you’re never going to spend money as you’re trying to grow your business.

That’s just downright misleading.

What I am trying to tell you is that the businesses that do the best are making sure that every dollar they spend is being spent to support what they are great at and as little as possible on everything else. When you’re looking at your business you need to be thinking of every expense as an investment, not just numbers in a checking account or in a report that Freshbooks (or Quickbooks) generates every month. You need to think in terms of opportunity costs and be constantly measuring what you’re spending money on and how that’s going to add value to your business.

Coffee meetings and business cards shouldn’t be necessary evils that are just rationalized expenses. You want to make sure, guarding money just like you should be guarding your time, that if you are allocating a resource or handing out a business card that it’s going to a person to which you can provide a ton of value.

That’s it! Those three things will help you create a strategy that actually works for you. Why?

1. When you don’t commit to an identity, your identity, you run the risk of washing yourself and your business out. You’ll scatter who you are and what you do so thinly that your audience won’t have anything compelling enough to hold on to and eventually engage with.

2. When you don’t make your strategy an everyday thing you run the risk of doing the same stuff that you’ve been doing all along. How can you affect change if you can’t distill what you want out of your business in a way that you can take action and implement daily? Answer: You can’t!  You don’t want to be the business that promises lots of things and struggles to deliver or worse never actually grows into the vision you had for it when you started.

3. When you don’t keep an eye on your spending, more specifically spending on the stuff that really matters you run the risk of self-stunting your growth. Money is easy to lose sight of because it’s easy to fall into the “I’m a habitual consumer trap” or the “if I had this one extra resource I’d be successful trap”. Be mindful and cut costs to grow stronger.

Building your strategy for your business is going to be a process. There’s going to be happy tears, sad tears and lots of anxious tears. That’s ok! When you’re following the advice of your favorite growth hacking guru or in my case I like to follow lots of different economists I want you to just remember these three things along the way. They will help ground you and help you build something that works with and for you.

Why Are Strategic Plans The Worst?!

I hate excuses. I think that the old way of creating long form strategic plans is an exercise in preemptively creating excuses for your business. Strategic plans are so often argued over, passively decided on and luxuriously spiral bound for businesses that haven’t yet done the work necessary to truly understand the impact of the decisions they are (or aren’t) making in their business. My favorite offenders are the one-page downloads that promise to, in one-page, definitively nail down the over-arching strategy you’re going to implement or execute on in your business. Definitively. All that stuff that looks just like strategic planning busy work is just that, it’s busy work and a scapegoat for you to blame your business shortcomings on later.

Don’t get it twisted though, I’m not at all down on crafting strategy for your business. Articulating goals is great. Teasing out effective ways for you to track whether or not your efforts are pushing you towards those goals, even better. Evaluating the decisions you make everyday against the backdrop of the vision and values you and your business stand for, the best. I’m just down on how maybe some institutions frame strategic planning…<<cough cough>> Some bad “business” mentors/consultants <<cough cough>>

But, that’s hard.

Getting to real understanding and depth in your business and for your customers means doing the work to understand more than just what you do and what you offer. It means getting to the heart of why your consumers choose (and maybe keep choosing) you, quantifying the real value you offer (not what you think you offer) and the ability to objectively identify what’s working and not working in your business.

Let’s set the scene. You're a new-ish business owner. (In business for yourself for less than 3 years.) You’ve been at your craft for a while, have moved a few units and/or have delivered a some hours of your services. You believe you bring value to your target market and you may even have a few testimonials on your website that support that claim. You wake up one morning and decide that you need strategy to get your business to the next level. That’s what you’ve read on the internet from your favorite “teach you how to build a business” business guru so it must be true. You’re first, albeit unintentional, excuse as to why you haven’t grown into the lifestyle or business size that you want is that you haven’t had a good strategy.

So you set off one morning and Google all kinds of fun strategic planning based keywords and over and over again you see the same kinds of results:

• Articles about the Balanced Scorecard

• Wikipedia Definition

• HBR Articles

• Forbes Articles

• Software/Web-App Planning Tools

• Dummies.com Articles

• Assortment of colleges and university course resources

Great. Now what?

I know what. You download the worksheets, read the blog posts, listen to a few podcasts and probably even peruse a few HBR articles. That’s great, you just spent hours getting your learn on. I’m all for learning but your shotgun scatter patterned attempt at muscling through how to create a strategic plan has forced you to a cross roads. Also on top of that, you’re still not even sure what the value of a strategic plan is for you and your business. #mixedmessages

At this point you’re making a choice.

1. You are either going to keep powering through and are going to try to recreate a strategic plan from some template or example and try to force what you “think” is important into a mold that most likely has nothing to do with who you are and what your business actually does.

2. Or you’ll quit. You’ll quit and move on and rationalize that you are too busy, too small or that crafting strategy really isn’t right for YOUR business.

Both are terrible but, are totally natural reactions. It’s the result of oversaturation/information overload, you're wrestling with how to spend what scarce resources you can muster on this task and business guru’s trying to package some program to sell you in a $497 ecourse.

That’s why strategic plans are the worst. You just spent all this time trying to figure it out and have made your way to creating something that is not at all authentic to you and your business or you move on from it all together.

Strategy is important and it hurts my heart that business owners never get to see the value of good strategy. Strategy that comes from deliberately thinking through problems and opportunities and actively participating in the choices that come from that thinking process.

Instead of trying to slap together some word document that you’ll only reference once or twice a year try this instead.

The Strategic Un-Planning Process

Below I’m going to outline an example process that you could use in lieu of the templates you just downloaded that I bet will work better for you and matter more to you. It’s not the be-all-end-all in strategic planning but if I can at least help one person who’s reading this create something that has the potential to be a real asset over some generic nonsense it’s 100% worth it.

1. Figure out what your long game really is for your business and be able to articulate that long game. Is it a specific idea of what you’re life will look like, some large financial goal or building a legacy business. That’s going to be the big idea you measure the choices you make everyday against.

2. In smaller intervals what kinds of goals are you going to have to hit to get to your long game. In strategic planning speak these would be your strategic aspirations. Is it buying a building, controlling 40% of your market share, selling one-billion hamburgers? Again get specific.

3. Repeat number two again but do that process for each of the individual goals you listed from step two. That should get you to a place where you can identify the actions you need to keep track of on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to get you to those goals. I’m all for impact and engagement but to be the most effective you need to associate actions with dollars.

4. Look outside your business. Talk to your customers about the value they really get from your offerings. What are the biggest pain points that customers can specifically share with you that you’ve solved. This will help you get even more focused in your offering and how to better position it in the market.

Before we move on I just want to recap what you will have really done up until this point. Going from 1-4 means you’ll have honestly reflected on what matters most to you, you’ll have broken down to at least two tiers worth of goals that you need to hit to get there and started to work out why people are engaging with you to better frame the actions you need to take to get more customers through the door. We are flying through these steps in a very simplistic way but this is all the work that I talked about in the beginning of this post.

 5. Look at your business. Really, truly, objectively look at your business. Do your day to day actions reflect the value that you bring to the market? What does it cost to get one more customer? Is there a gap between what you planned to do at the start of your business and what you are actually doing? Are you making excuses right now because there’s a little bit of dissonance stirring in your brain about this stuff? It’s time to do something about that right now. You need to DECIDE what the actions are in your business that are the biggest drivers in how you deliver value as well as get in front of potential new customers. If you’re struggling with this part I’ve built a decision making framework that you can download for free. (Notice it’s not a one-page strategic planning template. You’re welcome.)

6. Pick a handful of actions to really focus on in your business. Think of them as strategic themes. These are the types of work that align best with what’s important to you, your customers and what you want the business to stand for. Figure out what success for each of those actions looks like in a quantifiable way and how each of those themes will get you to your short, mid and long game goals.

7. Get to work and stick to it! What gets measured, gets managed. This is where the work really begins because here you’re working to prove the hypotheses you created for yourself. Just like in 7th grade science class you need to collect data and that data comes from getting your hands dirty. Creating and managing strategy is a daily practice and it works best when you can make decisions against the outcomes your actions are showing you. No winging it, no shortcuts, no more guessing about what you think people want - just data.

8. Rinse and repeat as necessary. What’s important to you may change over time and being honest about that is what makes strategy work. If you’re long game changes, your goals change or your market changes it’s ok. It just means that scale and scope of your work needs to change. This is where old timey strategic plans fall flat on their faces. When you or your business change, your work has to change or else your productivity and the quality of your outputs are going to drastically deteriorate. Think about the last time you worked on something you hated. You probably did the minimum and just went through the motions. If you are building a business I’m guessing that you don’t want to find yourself just going through the motions. Your customers probably don’t want that either.

I hope that if this blog post did anything for anyone it at least saved you a few hours of mindlessly searching for strategic planning resources on the interweb. This post was not designed to be a conclusive resource for your strategic planning needs but it was designed to challenge you to think. If you are pressed for time or resources I like to think that I’ve also offered you an abridged approach to creating something that matters for you personally.

Strategic planning is really a personal (business personal?) process and it’s not something you can just hammer out in a one page template and expect any real results. It’s a process that you have to work at everyday and one that requires you to get brutally truthful with. The people that buy from you or that you’d like to buy from you aren’t stupid, they know when what you’re offering is lip service. Customers know what authenticity is and how to hunt for the most value. Strategy at its core is about making decisions to so that your customers can find that value.

So, are you making decisions everyday that will match what you’re offering and how you deliver with the needs of the people that you serve?