Every successful business starts with a solid strategy. But what is a business strategy, and how do you create one that can drive real results? Many new or small business owners write up a one-page plan when starting, but never actually learn how to draft a winning business strategy. Here’s how you can harness the secrets behind some of the best business strategies.
What Is a Business Strategy?
A business strategy is your roadmap for achieving your entrepreneurial goals. It’s a plan that defines where you’re going, how you’ll get there, and what makes you different from your competitors. A well-crafted strategy aligns your team, focuses your resources, and supports strategic decision-making when challenges arise.
How to Create a Business Strategy Step-by-Step
A strong business strategy framework provides clarity, direction, and competitive advantage. By following these five steps, you can create a framework for your business that guides fact-based decision-making and drives long-term success.
Step 1: Define Your Vision and Mission Alignment
When developing a business strategy, start with the basics: your vision is what you want your company to become, while your mission explains why you do what you do today. These statements should inspire your team and resonate with your customers. Keep these statements clear, memorable, and authentic.
Step 2: Analyze Your Competitive Market Positioning
Understanding the competitive landscape is a crucial component when creating a business growth strategy. Research your market’s size, trends, and customer needs. Study your competitors to identify what they do well and where gaps exist. Look at pricing strategies, customer reviews, marketing approaches, and product offerings.
This analysis will reveal opportunities and obstacles you need to prepare for. Don’t just focus on your direct competitors, either—consider indirect alternatives that may solve the same customer problems that you do.
Step 3: Identify Your Unique Value Proposition
What makes your business stand out? Your unique value proposition explains why customers should choose you over competitors. It might be the quality of your products, the speed of your service, your product’s innovative features, or better pricing.
The key is to find something you can deliver consistently that is important to your customers. Your value proposition should be specific and supported by evidence, not just a generic claim that any of your competitors could also make.
Step 4: Set Strategic Goals and Objectives
Next, translate your vision into concrete, measurable goals. Use the SMART framework: your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Break larger goals into smaller objectives with quarterly or monthly milestones. This creates accountability and allows you to track your progress.
Step 5: Build Your Action Plan and Allocate Resources
Finally, it’s time for the execution. Detail the specific actions, initiatives, and projects needed to achieve each of your goals. Assign responsibilities to team members and allocate your budget, time, and talent accordingly. Identify the resources you have, the resources you need, and the gaps. Then, create timelines and establish key performance indicators to monitor your success.
Testing Your Business Growth Strategy
Remember that strategy isn’t static. One of the key principles of business strategy is to build in regular review periods to adjust your plan based on your results and changing market conditions.
It’s also essential that you don’t neglect the testing phase when developing a business strategy. Marketers constantly perform A/B testing. They change the font, colors, images, and overall feel of their campaigns to elicit a positive response. Applying this to your business, test your strategy with people both inside and outside your organization to gauge its utility.
Why You Should Prioritize Innovation in Your Business Strategies
Approaching your strategy through the lens of innovation helps your business maintain its priorities and keep all teams on the same page. In addition, it serves as a guide for discovering and implementing new ideas. Without a strategy, innovation fails to occur, and new things are never tried.
Take some time to decide where new ideas will come from in your business, how often you’ll seek them out, how frequently you’ll try to implement them, and how you’ll maintain cohesive goals as a company while pursuing these goals.
This part of your business growth strategy doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It should simply be a written set of guidelines to ensure that innovation remains a priority for your business.
How to Develop an Innovative Mindset in Your Business
Business strategies can help you maintain and nurture innovation as your company grows, but building an innovative mindset in your business really starts with your culture. Here are 5 ways to develop and maintain a creative mindset in your organization, starting from the ground up.
- Hire innovative people. Your team is a valuable resource for innovation. The people working to keep your business running often have the best ideas for improving the process. Keep an ear out for their suggestions and solicit regular feedback.
- Assign innovation as a task. Seeking new ideas is often the priority that falls by the wayside when things get hectic. By assigning research and brainstorming as recurring tasks for your employees, they will know to make time for them even when busy.
- Reward innovation. Often, employees are afraid to speak up when they have a new idea. Despite what managers and higher-ups frequently say, too many business leaders quickly put down or make excuses for new ideas. To foster a culture of innovation, you must reward employees for their opinions, even if you don’t use them.
- Maintain an influx of new ideas. Not every new concept will be good, so in this case, more is more. You’re more likely to stumble on something that sticks if you have a regular flow of new ideas from several sources.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. Innovation doesn’t always have to mean blazing new trails. It can simply mean adopting your competitors’ best practices or researching existing tools to help your business grow.
Building an innovative mindset is an ongoing process, but it’s worth pursuing if it will make your business growth strategy more effective. Many business owners pay lip service to innovation, but there’s no follow-through when it comes to seeking and implementing new ideas in the workplace.
How to Make Your Business Grow
There are many ways to help scale your business, and it’s essential to consider all of them when brainstorming your business strategies. According to Entrepreneur, here are some concrete ways to scale that you should factor into your business growth strategy:
- Create a sales funnel
- Use a customer management system (CMS)
- Research the competition
- Create a loyalty system
- Identify new opportunities
- Build an email list
- Form strategic partnerships
- Leverage global platforms
- Licensing deals
- Franchise model
- Diversify offerings
- Build passive income streams
- Acquire other businesses
- International expansion
- Create a webinar series
To this list, I would add “hire a coach.” You might not know the best business strategies, but a coach can help you determine the best path forward. A good business coach will encourage action, planning, and hard work.
More Tips on Developing a Growth Mindset for Your Business
Designing and implementing business strategies that foster growth takes time and effort. Once your plan is in place, all that’s left is to adjust your mindset to prepare for growth.
Company growth cannot happen without the proper mindset, purposeful actions, and accountability for the results. Developing a growth mindset requires a business growth strategy. We see this illustrated in Grant Cardone’s book, The 10X Rule, and in Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan’s book, 10X is Easier than 2X.
In 10X is Easier than 2X, the authors “encourage entrepreneurial leaders to aim for breakthrough goals.” They talk us through these elemental concepts:
- Why 10x goals require you to retain 20% and let go of 80% of your current activity
- Why 10x goals require you to develop a growth mindset from the start
- Why it’s essential to measure progress and not measure yourself against your 10x goals
- The paradox of why and how more time away from your business will accelerate your progress
- Why you need to build a self-managing, self-replicating team.
A growth mentality is abundantly apparent in this book. A 10x mindset will make you work outside your comfort zone and beyond your usual methods. If you settle for 2x growth, you limit yourself and your mindset. Exceed your potential by expanding your growth mindset.
You can behave in one of four ways when faced with opposition. You can do nothing, retreat, or take regular or massive action. Hint: the last of these is the key to your ultimate success.
Based on the experiences of a top sales trainer and business owner, they explain how anybody can apply a straightforward rule to set themselves up for lasting successes and ambitious achievements that once seemed out of reach.
6 Tips to Consider for Explosive Business Growth
In The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone, he writes about how anybody can apply one straightforward rule for ongoing success that was once out of reach. How? By working 10x as hard as competitors or 10x as hard as you initially thought. Making 100 calls per day, where others make 10, will ensure you’re achieving explosive growth.
Some key takeaways from Cardone:
- Success is for everyone, including yourself
- Success has no restrictions
- Success does not have to come at the expense of others
- Success doesn’t happen to you; it happens because of you
- Successful people don’t follow in the footsteps of those who have failed
- Successful brands like Google and Apple always put customer acquisition before customer satisfaction. (However, I would argue that this is backward.)
Business growth is about learning from your mistakes as you grow and move forward meaningfully. Developing this growth mindset is inherent in the path to success. Whether you believe you can or cannot be successful, you end up being correct.
As a business coach, I have decades of experience helping business owners improve their organizations and develop overall business growth strategies. Sign up for my mailing list to have weekly articles delivered to your email inbox, filled with practical tips to inspire innovation and growth in your business.
If you want to discuss how to create a business strategy that works for your business, fill out my contact form, and let’s schedule a complimentary video call to discuss some techniques to improve business performance.
Coach Dave
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