Strategy, Planning, More Planning and Strategy equals strategic planning, no that’s not true. As a young startup when you’re starting at zero and have a huge number of internal and external factors that may determine your future success. Is it worth the risk to be underprepared? Strategy doesn’t mean doing something exotic or out of the box it merely means to know the choices you have, plan pros and consequences of a choice that you would make in the future and all other options. Strategy ensures that no time is wasted on planning the next move, especially if you are the sole decision maker…..
In which areas of business should you strategize?
I say, the basics because in business, strategy does not equal plan but it does equal to choice. I was once part of startup that said our plan is to be a 50 member team by the end of the year and I was hiring for them. The question we never asked was what are these 50 people going to do? What targets do they have? How will you measure their performance and understand the ROI on that performance? There are 4 basics areas for every business to get their strategy right before they execute their plan.
- People Resources and other Resources
- Marketing
- Finance
- Distribution
Well, as an entrepreneur it is inevitable that you will spend on your resources like your website, blog, raw material, and people.
For example, strategy for an ecommerce website may mean, initially locking in your domain name, taking a basic plan for 3 to 6 months, focusing on building the product catalogue, specifications, getting quality product pictures, website navigation, setting up payment gateways that are secure and so on while simultaneously, if your product is ready, considering other ecommerce market places to run on a parallel universe while you get your website ready. Ideally, selling through established market place helps build trust that the product and brand exist and it would be delivered, where as it may take time for a person to start trusting a website before they remove their card to buy… Also the first sale from the website may take longer than expected, you’d have to be promoting your website through socials like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and other relevant platforms where you would find your target audience
People Resource strategy is when you pre-define your management style, your culture and your value statement. Ideally you may want to define if you are a performance driven organization, or quality driven, you may want to set up your targets, KPIs and Metrics that you will measure before you begin. In this manner you save time, I was once part of an organization that had a few to no processes in place, and they had been functioning in that way for 6 years, as an HR I was tasked with these initiatives which also lead to frictions, impact on organization culture, repulsive behavior, delays in following through with the process, for instance, a quarterly performance reviews took 45 days to complete. We will discuss more about culture and people strategies some other time.
So once, we’ve understood that the true meaning of strategy, is nothing more than a pre-defined and basic choice that should be taken in a few basic business areas and that should be decided in advance if ever a situation were come to pass, we can now understand why strategizing is important.
- It saves you time in decision making
- Helps your organization stay agile
- Helps in flexibility and adaptability
- It acts as a guide in difficult times
- It helps create a greater vision for the organization in a future that can not be determined
- Finally, it gives you a competitive advantage.
“Competitive advantage! How?” you may ask, simple, For example, you have a product, that product could be developed seeing the current market trends, with strategy you start to think what if the government comes with a different mandate or policy, would a small tweak in the product help you sustain, or change in use case be feasible and what if a new business had to enter the market with a slightly better version of your product, would you be agile and versatile enough to implement the same…
Strategy can also be defined as the “What if analysis”. Asking this question will help you get answers in certain aspects and further subjecting those answers to scrutiny, will help you define a strategy that would benefit you in the future.
So yes, strategy is important and it should be thought of well in advance as the future course of action and in some cases the survival of the business may be depended on it.
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