Most business owners think they have a strategy. To prove it, they point at results: Revenue is up, headcount is growing, projects keep coming in, the phone is ringing, cash flow is decent. To prove strategy, they will point to growth. But ask them why this growth is occurring, and the answer gets muddy fast. That’s because growth is an outcome, but strategy is a choice.
Growth can occur spontaneously, even accidentally. Maybe the market is hot. Maybe a competitor stumbled. Maybe you said “yes” to every opportunity. Maybe your people are over-leveraged. None of that is strategy, certainly not a sustainable one. Strategy, by contrast, is deliberate, and it’s about tradeoffs: What you will do, what you won’t do, who you are built to serve, where you will focus the limited time, energy and capital you have. If your leadership team can’t articulate those choices clearly and consistently, you don’t have a strategy.
Businesses without a strategy are at the whim of every market turn. The precarious growth you cling to can disappear overnight, leaving you stuck. Things still feel like they are moving fast, but they aren’t getting any easier. Repeat problems and decisions keep popping up, but there are no answers because leadership has skipped past the essential questions that define a business’s strategy: Why do we exist? What do we stand for? Where are we really trying to go? The answers to these questions will inform every subsequent decision your business faces. Once you have them, you can set goals, plan initiatives, record processes and choose which tools are necessary for your business to thrive.
There’s a reason that strategy comes first in the BOSS system, and it isn’t because it looks good on a whiteboard. It’s because everything else your business does – finance, people, process, metrics, meetings – gets easier once you have answered those fundamental questions.
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