Basic Strategy – Part II

By Guest Blogger Adam Bullied
This is the second segment in a three-part series about Basic Strategy. Read Part I.

Determine Your Objectives

Before diving head first in to constructing a strategy for any given area of your business, you must first strongly consider what it is you are attempting to achieve. Ideally, this end result can be measured in some way to determine if the strategy was ultimately successful, and to keep it on track throughout its execution.

If you can’t clearly articulate the objective(s) you are trying to reach, chances are you will not be able to arrive at a clear path for reaching them. Examples may include improving customer satisfaction rating, or becoming cash flow positive, or gaining market share. The point is that these types of things represent a clear vision you can get folks within your company behind.

Figure Out How to Measure Progress and Success

Image: istockphoto

After you have figured out what you want to do, you need to figure out how you are going to track your progress. Everyone has heard the old adage “you can’t manage it if you can’t measure it,” and it’s entirely true. If you don’t know how to say, “our strategy is working toward helping us achieve our goal” then you have fooled yourself and need to re-think things a bit.

Don’t feel like you need extreme Excel spreadsheets with formulas and fancy footwork when you hear the word “metric.” You really just need to ensure that how you are measuring your success is tied to the goal itself. For example, if you did in fact want to improve customer satisfaction chances are, the best way to know is to actually measure your customers’ satisfaction.

The first thing would be to take a baseline (or a pulse) so you know where you are at today. Even if it’s 0, that’s fine – you just want something for comparing with later on down the road.

Determine the Strategy

So now you are at the point where you can actually start to figure out how it is you are going to accomplish your goals you have laid out. During this process, you will probably find that tweaking your metrics is a prudent thing to do – and it is. You want to ensure everything stays aligned as tightly as possible.

I’d recommend staying away from big, complicated things at early stages. You want simple, clean, easy to understand, and streamlined paths to success. This helps you build your business on a series of wins and success – complexity goes up from there, because with success comes more business, growth, managerial requirements, and the like.

Really, if you can sit back and think, “by taking actions A, B, and C, and knowing that metric D will stay at value E, we will achieve goal F” you have essentially constructed a strategy.

Execute

Really, this is what it’s all about. Almost anybody can come up with a strategy – but the hard part is actually executing it successfully. If your company can do that, you’ll be ahead of the game. But this is the hardest part – knowing where to stack resources, holding folks accountable, maintaining focus when you are being pulled myriad of different possible ways – and, of course, keeping your eye on the bottom line.

At the end of it all, you are running a business. If the strategy you have come up with isn’t working, take the time needed to re-evaluate and figure out why. But as I point out with the milk example above, don’t over think it as you run the risk of analysis paralysis, but don’t under think it as well – both are silly.

You need to fully understand why you are setting your business in to a specific direction. Maybe you turn out to be wrong – that’s the risk. But maybe you turn out to be right and it opens up a bunch of new, and otherwise unseen, opportunities.

But to get to either of those outcomes, you have to execute what it is you came up with in the first place.

Tomorrow we will have the third part of the Basic Strategy series and look at two case studies. Read Part I.

Adam Bullied has more over 8 years of experience working in start-ups and maintains a blog on product management at WriteThatDown.com.