In a previous article, I described a business as a vehicle that gets you to your goals. The business is the vehicle, you are the owner designing and steering it, and your goals are the destination.
This leaves a practical question: how are you going to get there?
For this article, I’m defining strategy as: “finding a way to reach your goals, considering the limited resources you have at your disposal, and directing attention and resources to the things that can make the biggest difference in moving you in that direction“.
Start With Your Goal and Your Current Situation
To find a way from A to B, you need to understand both where you want to go and where you are starting from.
If your goal is greater freedom, what does that mean in practice? Working fewer hours? Being able to take time away? Having a business that can operate without you making every decision?
The answer gives you something specific to work towards. It also helps you assess whether a particular choice would bring you closer to that goal.
You then need to look at the business as it is today: the customers it serves, the demand it has, what it can deliver, and the time, money and skills available to it. A route that depends on resources you don’t have will need to account for how you will obtain them.
Decide on the Direction of the Business
Finding a way to reach your goals could mean deciding on the direction of the business: who to serve, which needs to address and what to offer. And it could also mean finding the constraint that is holding you back from reaching them – which could be at the level of the direction of the business, or execution (within different functions), or external (market?)
Those choices need to fit together. The customers you choose must have a need your offer can address, and the business must be able to deliver it in a way that supports your goals. You also need a reason to believe those customers will choose your offer over the alternatives available to them.
For example, if you want a business that can operate with less of your involvement, the kind of work you sell matters. An offer that requires your personal expertise on every project places different demands on the business from one that your team can deliver.
This gives you a way to judge opportunities. A new service or type of customer needs to be considered in relation to the business you are trying to build.
Find What is Limiting Progress
Strategy could also involve finding the biggest constraint preventing progress and deciding what to do about it.
The constraint matters in relation to the goal. If the business needs more customers and has the capacity to serve them, generating sufficient demand may be the priority. If it already has more work than it can fulfill, its ability to deliver may need attention first.
If your goal is to work fewer hours, the business’s dependence on you may be the constraint, even while sales are growing.
Understanding this helps you decide where your resources could have the greatest effect. Improving one part of the business is useful when that improvement helps produce the result you need.
Your choice of direction and your understanding of the constraints should inform each other. Sometimes you can address a constraint within the current way of operating. Sometimes it gives you a reason to choose a different way forward.
Bring Those Choices Together
Let’s take the example of a service business whose owner wants to maintain their income while reducing their working hours.
The business has enough demand, but each project is different, and the owner is involved in scoping the work, making decisions and checking delivery. Taking on more of the same work would add to that involvement.
One possible strategy would be to focus on a particular type of customer with a recurring need and develop a service the team can deliver more consistently.
That choice would connect several parts of the business. Marketing would attract those customers, sales would set expectations around the service, and delivery would develop a process and clear responsibilities for fulfilling it.
The owner might then direct their time towards testing the offer, developing the team’s ability to deliver it and handing over routine decisions. They would also need to limit work that pulls the business away from that direction.
Whether this is a workable route depends on what happens in practice: will customers buy the service, can the team deliver it, and can it support the owner’s income with less of their involvement? Those questions give the owner something concrete to test.
Decide What Gets Your Attention
With limited resources, choosing where to focus also means choosing what you will leave aside.
There may be several things you could improve. The question is which of them would make the biggest difference to your progress, considering the resources required and the likelihood that the change will work.
This makes strategy useful in everyday decisions. It gives you a basis for deciding which opportunities to pursue, which projects to prioritize and which requests to decline.
As you act, you also learn. Customers may respond differently from what you expected. A change may take more resources than you anticipated. Solving one constraint may reveal another.
You need to check whether your choices are producing the intended results. In the example above, that includes the owner’s income and working hours, as well as sales and delivery performance.
That feedback allows you to adjust the route. As the business and its circumstances change, so can the best use of your attention and resources.
