You Need A Business Strategy In 2024

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED [00:00:00] Hey, Hey, hopefully you have settled into the new year. Maybe this is only your first week back at work, and hopefully it hasn't been too much of a jolt after the holiday season. But given that we're in this kind of fresh start vibe, I thought it was a really good opportunity for us to go back to some basics around something that I spend a lot of time talking about. And that is your business strategy. A couple of things we need to understand your strategy is simply the way that you plan to operate long-term in order to be successful at whatever goals you've set. So people get strategy and plan really mixed up. Strategy is a high level long-term view of your business. And how you're going to operate. Your plan is then the combination of the tactics that you are going to use in order to fulfill that strategy. And plans tend to be shorter term made up of tasks and actions that you're going full. So in entrepreneurship, we see a lot of work happening on plans and planning and small businesses. But less focused on true strategic work. And as a CEO, as a small business need that this is actually your job. Your job is to guide this strategy and then your teams can create the plans to implement it. And creating a strategy takes work. It takes thinking it takes coordination. It takes a lot of experience. It takes a lot of skill and it can feel kind of overwhelming. So I want us to be really clear on why we need one. Y you should not just have a 90 day plan. I'm a hundred percent behind 90 day plans. However, 90 day plans should be building blocks to wards. This overall strategy for your business. So I want you to think about it as. You've got the big business strategy. So the high level view. Then you should have a strategy for each department. So a marketing strategy, a sales strategy and ops strategy that is focused on fulfilling. [00:02:00] The high level strategy. And then underneath those departmental strategies. You would have a 90 day marketing plan, which is more about the tactics. That you will implement to achieve the marketing strategy and by achieving the marketing strategy. You hope to achieve the overall strategy? Okay. So it's all these building blocks. When we talk about a 90 day plan, it's one building block towards that overall strategy. And the reason you need to have that strategy is to make sure that everyone in your team. No matter what department they're in knows exactly where they're headed. Cause if you think there's a 90 day plan in marketing, There's a 90 day plan and opposites and 90 day plan in sales. If you only have a marketing strategy and a sales strategy and an ops strategy, nothing is coordinating those strategies together. Then within marketing, if you only have a social media plan and a podcast plan. And a blog plan. Nothing is coordinating those plans together without that marketing strategy. So the strategy is there to act as this guide. Across your whole business. It should be implementing decisions. It should be implementing actions. Everything should be geared towards how does this help us on our strategy? What does strategy really allows us to do is to be proactive rather than reactive. Think about Netflix here as an example. Be a strategy was to disrupt the home entertainment industry. And they took on the biggest name. What was the biggest name doing? They were rinsing out DVDs. So they rented off DVDs by the post. Then come the early two thousands, the internet is massive. they strategy is still to disrupt home entertainment. They don't change their direction. But they changed how they did it and they brought in streaming. They were able to be proactive while keeping going in the same direction they could look at based on our current strategy, where are they gaps, where are the opportunities? How can we get in there? And they could change their plans and their implementation behind that. Versus if you [00:04:00] think about blockbuster, which was very stock, it didn't have that forward thinking direction. They weren't able to react as Netflix took them on and DVDs. And definitely not as Netflix took them on with streaming, they weren't able to keep up. They were in a reactive situation. Netflix was in a proactive situation. Netflix is a very strategy, heavy business. They think long-term about how to reach their goals. And because I know that you would rather be the Netflix in your business rather than the blockbuster. I want to spend a couple of weeks really talking about the components of strategy, how we pull it all together. And what makes it really successful? But for today, I want you to reflect on your strategy at the moment. Do you have one? Is it well-defined. Can you. easily explain it to your team? Do you need to spend some more time on it? For most people, that answer is probably a yes. As I said, entrepreneurs are really good at making plans. To less good at having a strategy. I think there's an element where we feel hemmed in by a longterm strategy. But strategies are not plans. They're not do this task, then do this task. Then do that task. Their guides over the longterm that keep us moving in that right direction. And so we should want and have these in all of our businesses.