If it’s your dream to build a business, you cannot overlook strategy. Your imagination is full of product launches, pitches and huge injections of funding from a dragon’s den of investors, but to give yourself the best chance of success, and of those visions coming true, you need to plan properly. You need a strategy for your business: something that tells you where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.
The Risks of Going Without
As a founder, you’ll be making dozens of decisions every day, and especially at the beginning even the smallest of them could have life or death consequences for your business. Unfortunately, even good decisions can have negative consequences for your growing brand if they’re not the right good decisions. Every one of them contributes to the brand you’re growing, from the inventory you’re assembling, the customer service staff you’re hiring and the logistics companies you’re talking to.
All these decisions have to stack up into a coherent brand targeted at the customers you know want to spend money with you – and if they don’t, if you have no strategy guiding those decisions beyond what’s the best value, then you’re not going to build a brand that attracts customers.
Without a strategy it’s also hard to control your spending – you could find yourself short of cash when you want to expand or if an unexpected bill comes due because you’ve not encoded any red lines about finances or savings, or a time scale for development into your planning.
Developing a Strategy
Creating a strategy for your business is no simple task. You need to identify goals and values and work out how you can achieve your goals in line with those values. You need insight into your customers, into your competitors and your industry at large, and you need to be able to project ten years into the future if your strategy’s going to be useful beyond the short term.
This is why even small businesses and startups make use of strategy consulting firms – they’re not a luxury for huge brands, they’re a vital resource for smaller businesses without the institutional knowledge needed to cover such a broad field. A calculated intervention from expert consultants temporarily levels up your ability to approach this task, leaving you with a document that will continue to be an asset to your business for years if not decades.
