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Guest Blog from Tom Frisby
November is Focus on Your Business Month.
Why even bother to think about strategy?
This is an excellent reprint of a blog from Seth Godin, April 10, 2018. It is as true today as it has ever been. An interesting statistic is that most small business owners obsess over tactics and have little to no strategy other than making money. The biggest reasons for not having even a basic strategy in place were uncertainty about what it actually is and not wanting to 'waste time' on something that is not important? I wonder where those businesses would be if they slowed down for a moment and plotted a course forward and worked the plan for the same 12 hours a day they spend floundering around with tactics? Ummm .....?
If you really want to get serious about your business, no matter what your plans for it are, then this blog is just for you.
Take it away Seth .....
There's confusion between tactics and strategy. It's easy to get tied up in semantic knots as you work to figure out the distinction. It's worth it, though, because strategy can save you when tactics fail.
If a tactic fails, you should consider abandoning it.
But that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with your strategy. Your strategy is what you keep doing even after you walk away from a tactic.
A real estate broker could decide that her goal is to get more listings.
And her strategy is to achieve that by becoming the most trusted person in town.
There are then 100 tactics she can use to earn that trust. She can coordinate events, sponsor teams, host community meetings in her office, sponsor the local baseball team, be transparent about her earnings, hire countless summer interns at a fair wage, run seminars at the local library, etc. ...
It doesn't matter if one or two or five of the tactics aren't home runs. They add up.
But if once, just once, she violates someone's trust and expectations, the entire strategy goes out the window.
Tactics are disposable.
Strategy is for the long haul.