Business Strategy for Entrepreneurs

Vision, Tactics and Focus: An Instant Guide

Guy Rigby

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857191687
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

This eBook is about business strategy for entrepreneurs, examining in particular the vision, tactics and focus needed by entrepreneurs.The author of this instant guide from Harriman House, Guy Rigby, has also written From Vision to Exit, which is a complete entrepreneurs' guide to setting up, running and passing on or selling a business.

Strategy: Part One — Vision, Strategy and Tactics

“Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity.”

— Earl Nightingale

Having a great strategy will not necessarily lead to business success, but a poor one will almost certainly prevent it. Strategy goes to the heart of a business, determining direction and the actions you take on a day-to-day basis. Get strategy right and your business will probably fly. Get it wrong and, even if you survive, you will forever be pushing water uphill.

Notably, the word ‘strategy’ is of military origin, derived from the Greek word strategos, which roughly translates as leader or general. It refers to a plan of action to achieve a particular goal, acting as a guide and dictating both direction and scope. In business, strategy embodies our vision of where we are heading and how we will get there, aligning our intentions with our expectations and values.

As David G. Thompson, author of Blueprint to a Billion, says, “the journey to achieving exponential growth – across, up, and down economic cycles – is rarely a smooth one.” For this reason, it is essential to have a well-defined and carefully considered strategy. It needs to be capable of guiding you through the ever-changing business landscape towards the goals you want to achieve.

Strategy is shaped by our knowledge, experience, relationships, resources and competencies and our assessment of the best way to leverage these; it is shaped too by our vision and values. Strategy is always emergent, responsive to market conditions and customer needs and altered by fresh opportunities and threats.

Once you’ve determined the overall strategy for your business, you’ll need to consider your sub-strategies. For example, there is operational strategy (how you organise your business in terms of processes, resources and people), product strategy (how you will source and deliver your products or services), marketing strategy (how you will raise awareness and stimulate demand) and financial strategy (how you will structure and finance the business). In short, strategy has an important part to play in every area of your business.

So how do business leaders create successful, workable and achievable strategies for their businesses?

For me, there are three key stages:

1. Vision: The vivid mental image and perception of your end game. Knowing where you’re heading and being able to see the destination in your mind’s eye.
2. Strategy: The direction you’ll follow to pursue your goals and achieve your vision over time.
3. Tactics: The actions you’ll take daily to assure the delivery of your strategy.

Envisioning a worthwhile future has long been a key motivator for successful business leaders. They use it to develop their strategies and tactics to bring their vision to fruition.

Amazon is a great example of this. Despite investors thinking he was crazy, on realising in 1994 that web usage was growing exponentially, Jeff Bezos’s view of the future of e-commerce was clear. His founding dream and vision was to become the best retailer on the internet and “build a book store with universal selection”; a store without walls that he hoped would become “Earth’s most customer-centric company”.

His belief in this vision was so strong that he resigned from his highly paid job to establish Amazon.com and sell books over the internet. The site subsequently became the largest retailer on the internet and a point of reference for all online retailers. Amazon has seen an astounding rate of growth, with well over 100 million customers worldwide buying everything from books and music to clothes and DVDs. This is because Jeff Bezos didn’t just dream his vision – he also created a strategy and deployed tactics to implement it.

The strategy was twofold, offering both an improved choice and experience and, crucially, cheaper prices. Recognising that the fundamental problem with a traditional book store was the size-imposed limit on how broad a selection of books it could stock, his strategy involved creating a store without walls on the web, boasting a universal and almost unlimited choice. (Whilst high street book shops could, like Amazon, order any book requested by a customer, they could not display them all.) This was combined with an interactive online environment, providing a speed and sophistication of service that superseded anything a traditional book store could offer.

His specific tactics included building an unrivalled payment platform, offering purchasing recommendations based on consumer-buying habits (and the buying habits of consumers with similar tastes) and, ultimately, focusing on the customer experience above all else.

So what’s your vision? What’s your strategy? And what are your tactics?

Thankfully, there are many tools and guides to help you devise an achievable and workable strategy and many tactics that will bring your strategy to life. We’ll explore some of these later in this chapter, but the first thing you’ll need is vision.

Vision

Developing a strategy and then working out how to reach your goals isn’t easy. However, it’s far more achievable if you have a clear vision of the future. The tactics you use along the way may involve experimentation and change, but vision is a constant. So it’s important to begin with the end in mind.

Henry Ford turned his dream of the future, producing a “car for the masses”, into fact. Bill Gates visualised “a computer on every desk and in every home”. Boeing’s Bill Allen dreamt of a jet-powered passenger aircraft. The business world is littered with entrepreneurs who based their strategies around their own long-term visions. Great leaders visualise and strategise. They consider the ideal and the real side-by-side, simultaneously mapping out idealistic and realistic eventualities in order to build successful, sustainable enterprises.

Strategy

If your vision is clear, it’s time to consider the strategies you will develop to achieve your goals. You’ll need to get all of the pieces on the table to complete the jigsaw, so here are some of the places to start:

• research and gather knowledge about your market
• open dialogue to gain insight and understanding
• assess and analyse your current business position.

Research and gather knowledge about the market

Most successful entrepreneurs build businesses based on their passion or experience. They already know a huge amount about their market or have had direct experience of working in it over many years, noting the inefficiencies and opportunities. They create businesses in areas they understand. And that remains their focus. How many times have you heard of entrepreneurs ‘going round again’ whilst remaining in the same industry?

Robert Wright, an entrepreneur and alumnus of Cranfield Business School, started his career as a pilot with British Airways. He then founded and sold two airline businesses – Connectair to International Leisure Group and CityFlyer to British Airways. Following these successes, he became a director and founding shareholder of Wizz Air, a low-cost Eastern European airline. He has stuck to his métier, pursuing opportunities in an area which he understands and in which he has been working all his life.

So experience helps – but new opportunities emerge and it’s not impossible to break into new markets. To do so, however, you will need a strong blend of insight, data and knowledge.

“Knowing what products and services are being offered, how they’ve developed over time, what the current issues are in the marketplace … having this detailed knowledge enables you to see the opportunities for materially high growth,” says Sir Eric Peacock, an experienced chairman who has bought and sold many businesses, including Babygro Plc.

Kodak is an example of a company that spent a huge amount of time and effort studying the behaviour and needs of consumers as it launched its digital strategy. It discovered that women in particular enjoyed taking digital photos, but moving those images onto their computers was an area of frustration for many. This unmet requirement created a huge opportunity and they set about improving their offerings to entirely remove this frustration. They created printer docks and other products with one strategic focus: to make it easier for consumers to share digital photos. They identified the issues and opportunities in the marketplace that would maximise the success of their digital strategy. (We’ll look in more detail at Kodak’s shifting strategy in Part Three of this eBook.)

Open dialogue to gain insight and understanding

Talking to customers and suppliers is crucial. It’s important to fully understand what they want and need, what they are doing now and what their plans are for the future.

Such a dialogue is something which Piers Daniell, IT expert and director of independent telecommunications ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Publishing details
• Praise for From Vision to Exit
• About the Author
• Preface
• Strategy: Part One — Vision, Strategy and Tactics
• Strategy: Part Two — Growth, Pace and Profit
• Strategy: Part Three — Flexibility and Focus
• From Vision to Exit
• Other Business eBooks From Harriman House