The missing pieces of strategy — Kelford Labs Daily

Often, I’ll hear things like, “Our strategy is to grow our profit margin.”

Or, “Our strategy is to post consistently on LinkedIn.”

Or, “Our strategy is to increase our paid advertising.”

Which, I don’t have to tell you, are not strategies.

Because a strategy is not a plan. It’s not an objective. It’s not even a course of action. It is all of those things.

It is, in sum: The structure to work efficiently to get what you want.

That means that if it doesn’t articulate the end objective and how you’ll know when you’ve reached it, it isn’t a strategy.

If it doesn’t prescribe efficient actions based on current resources and capabilities, it isn’t a strategy.

And if it doesn’t articulate a clear structure for persisting, adapting, and learning, it isn’t a strategy.

So how do you know when you’re working with a real strategy?

When you know exactly what you want. When you know exactly what you’re going to do. And when you know exactly how you’ll keep at it until it works—or until you learn enough to improve.

But it doesn’t have to be long-winded or complicated.

Something as simple as, “We will spend 20 minutes every day (structure) creating and distributing marketing content on our blog (actions) until we have a corpus of insight we can reference in our proposals (objective)” constitutes a strategy.

This simple statement tells you what you’re doing, when you’re done, and how you’re going to do it.

So the next time someone says the word strategy, ask yourself: What’s the objective? What are the actions? What is the structure?

It starts by simply noticing when you hear or read the word and paying attention to what it describes. The word “strategy” can trick us into thinking there’s been thinking done—but we need to analyze and identify whether all the pieces are actually there.

Because, if they aren’t, how will we know that our strategy is taking us in the right direction—and how will we know how to get there?

Kelford Inc. helps hands-on entrepreneurs and founders with complex marketing challenges define and articulate their unique value to their very best customers.

We’ll show you the way to always knowing what to say.