Chapter 18: Strategy is Focus

With most of the financials now done, it's time to turn to strategy and tactics. You've been developing strategy throughout the planning process, I know, because you can't do the numbers without thinking about the strategy. However, now you want to explain your strategy and develop the implementation. If you refer back to the text outline we discussed in Fundamentals: Pick Your Plan, you probably have several topics still blank in your plan document. But not in your mind. It's time to write your thoughts on strategy and tactics into your text outline.

Define Overall Strategy

Strategy is focus. Across the entire business, over the whole range of possibilities involving different products and services, different target customers, different kinds of financing, different levels of growth, what are your choices? What are your priorities?

General Principles of Real-World Strategy

In 30 years of working with businesses of all sizes, I've come across several of what I would call general principles of strategy. These don't necessarily apply in the academic world, or for larger corporate enterprises, but they do apply to small and medium businesses everywhere:

Strategy is Focus. The more priorities in a plan, the less chance of successful implementation.
Strategy Needs to be Consistently Applied Over a Long Term to Work. Better to have a mediocre long-term strategy consistently applied for years than a series of brilliant but contradictory strategies that never last long enough to matter.
Strategy Needs to be Tailored. There are no standard strategies. Every company is different. A given strategy must always be tailored for a specific company.
Strategy Needs to be Realistic. You have to deal with your company as it is at this point in time, understanding what choices you really have, what knobs you can actually turn.
The Best Strategies are Market Driven. When possible, it's not "how to sell what we have," but rather, "how to make what people want or need what we offer."
Good Strategies Understand Displacement. Displacement in business refers to the undeniable fact that everything you try to do rules out many other things that you therefore can't do. You have to choose carefully, because one project displaces many others.

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