FACT: All business owners struggle with strategy.
You are not the exception.
Your strategy is not your mission, vision, values, drivers, or partner network. Nor is it your business model, products, services, or marketing methods.
FACT: Most business owners confuse tactics with strategy. You are not alone.
Strategy is the set of principles you choose for guiding decision making. Strategic planning comes before business planning and is used to identify and assess alternatives so you can effectively evaluate your options. (Business planning is then used to implement a specific business strategy.)
One (of the many) reasons you suffer from overwhelm is not putting your strategy in place first. However, once you have worked through and defined it, you will more easily be able to navigate the many options for moving forward with your business and sort through the huge number of choices and decisions driving you crazy right now.
POWER TIP: Begin defining your business strategy by first making a list of the key core values, principles and characteristics by which you want to be known and respected. These themes subsequently form the basis for all the other strategies you’ll need to decide upon to move forward with your business including (but not limited to):
- business model selection
- business development
- competitive positioning
- customer acquisition
- financial growth
- marketing and promotion
- personal and professional development
- product and service creation
- tax management
- team building and outsourcing
- technology selection
We’ll be offering several tools to help you with this in the coming months and will make them available here for you. Thank you for your patience while I build the library for you! Please consider subscribing to SMARTSTART if you want to be first to know when new materials are published.
In the interim, here are some posts on this topic that may interest you:
3 Questions That Shape Your Strategy
Choose Yourself
Are You Thinking Strategically?
Success Requires Strategy
Top 10 Mistakes Business Owners Make