Wherever you are, whether in a one person company or a multibillion dollar enterprise, strategy is what will set you apart. While most of us realize it’s important, we also often don’t understand what it is.
Let’s start with what it isn’t. Strategy is not about your vision statement, your mission statement or your projects and action plans. It’s not about your ten-year, five-year, or on-year plan. It’s not your weekly meetings, your status reports, or metric dashboards.
Those items are all important. You’ll need them, since they help turn your strategy into reality. But the best plans in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the right strategy to begin with.
So, what is strategy? Put simply, your strategy is what you are going to do that nobody else is doing that will add value that nobody else is providing.
At the end of the day it’s about creating value. More importantly, it’s what you are going to do different to create that value. And to be a little contrarian, to find that value, you don’t start strategy with a solution, you start with a problem.
Let’s talk about the key elements that will get you started:
The problem – the value you will bring is solving a problem that nobody else is solving. Google solved the problem of being able to easily find anything you wanted on the web. Facebook found a way to leverage technology to help us connect. Amazon found an inexpensive way to buy anything we want and have it delivered to our door. The value of your solution is going to depend on two things – how many people have the problem, and how big is it (or how much will they pay to have you solve it). It may feel like all the problems are already solved (Duell – the head of the patent office in 1899, famously said just that). But it’s not true. There is still so much opportunity in the world. A differentiating feature of entrepreneurs is they have the eyes to see them, and we each need to focus on that ability.
The people – A business is about selling a good or service to people, so a key element that you need to understand is who will be willing to buy your product. How big is the problem they are feeling? What are they using to day to solve the problem? Why would they choose you? Even if they love your solution, can they afford it? Once you find a solution, how are you going to reach them? If you’re a non-profit, finding people who need your help is easy, look to poverty or the third world.
The solution – Understanding what the problem is and who needs you to solve it for them is a great start. By having a hard problem doesn’t matter if you don’t have a great solution. Everyone would love an electric car to zoom to work in 10 minutes instead of an hour. The simple reason we all aren’t driving them is that the technology to create one for a price we all can afford, and driving them in a way we all don’t create a disaster in the skies is a really tough problem.
Our world is moving fast. Technology is helping us do things we never imagined. We have access to information that is helping us find better solutions to problems we hadn’t thought of. But these tools are also democratizing the world, making it possible for anyone to think of the next big idea. Strategy is the secret to being able to be successful in this market, and stay that way. Understanding the problem, the people, and the solution isn’t the end of the problem, but it’s a great place to start.