Are you running as fast as you can? Are you getting anywhere?
If you need to make big changes do they come out of time that you don’t have?
When you answer questions like those and don’t get an answer that you like it’s often time to have another look at your business strategy.
Business Strategy is all about the big picture. It’s about where you want to go and who you want to be. It’s what you want to change.
For most entrepreneurs and small businesses strategy seems to be an unaffordable luxury. For the last fifteen years my wife and I have set up and run small businesses. Like most entrepreneurs public holidays have meant a day working from home with children underfoot. Holidays are short and are spent with one or other of us doing at least a few hours of work each day.
If you are like me there is a never ending list of tasks to be done. Somehow it only ever gets longer.
Strategy is all about prioritisation and goal setting. The aim is to identify where you need to be. It then lets you focus your efforts on the stuff that moves the needle.
For example I’m a big fan of the business model canvas. Some people thinks it’s a nice piece of A4 paper that has no impact. For me it shows the really critical parts of my business that have to work smoothly. Every task is measured against how it delivers. If I can’t say that it improves a component of my business model it goes out.
That’s the super high level picture. In this section I gather together some of the best posts I’ve written that will help you identify and set your business strategy. Some will be a fit for you right now. Others will be more helpful a year or so down the path.
Enjoy!
Do I need help with my business strategy?
Do you take a long time to decide? Get paralysed by uncertainty? Keep changing course? Never see the results you expect?
Most entrepreneurs are pretty awesome at many aspects of their business. We start off because we believe that we have some insight, skill or experience that will help us achieve success.Sometimes that includes seeing the big picture and getting how all the different parts of your business work together. Others just love to focus on the part that they are passionate for. When I help entrepreneurs and business owners to develop their business strategy we tend to do one of two things. First, we brainstorm and argue back and forth until we find a new approach that really works. Secondly, I do that process for you and offer you one or more options that will help you accelerate your business forward.
Case Studies
- Business Turnaround Case Study – How I helped a small business escape from a death spiral
- Regulatory Change Case Study – How I got the law changed and saved a client $6 million
- Business Strategy Generation Case Study– Helping a startup find the right business model to make his idea a success
Which we do is up to your personal style.
Whichever approach we take I always look deeply into who your customer is and the pain that you are solving for them. That’s often an area where we can get some quick wins for you. The next area is to look at your value proposition, and how it compares to the competition. What can we add that provides lots of value to your customers but costs little to provide. Why is expensive to do but they don’t care about?How can we improve your customer service, or slash its costs? Are you banging your marketing head in a highly competitive arena or scratching for customers on a dusty empty field? What resources do you need to deliver? Are you paying too much for them? Or perhaps you need vastly more than you can access?These are things that every entrepreneur can do. Too often we don’t have the time or energy to do them. We need to keep firefighting, rushing, keeping the lights on.This is where I can help. I take your ideas, your vision and figure out how to get from where you are now to the end goal. Then we implement and make the big changes that you want.
Set up a call and let’s get started.
