Strategy

Something went wrong and you’re not sure what to do about it.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. You’ve had problems you couldn’t fix before. You’ve had other problems that seem to occur repeatedly.

What’s going wrong? Are you solving anything? Are you fixing it the wrong way?

What goals do you have for your company?

Want to grow your business and increase your profitability?

Of course you do! But I’ll let you in on a little secret: Company growth is not a goal — it’s a means to an end.

When we envision the future of our companies, we often jump ahead to the idea that our business should be bigger and make more money… but we miss the details of what it takes to get us there.

We’re in the age of instant gratification, but can you really expect to grow your AV business immediately?

It seems a little unreasonable — yet we sometimes aim for instant growth anyway.

Maybe you’re frustrated with your sales team because they don’t have the numbers you want. Or maybe you feel like your company is stuck in a rut.

Whatever the reason, you’re not satisfied with your business and you want to know how to grow your business now.

So, is it possible?

You want to be a successful person.

You want to own a successful business.

But can you really do both?

The combination of a successful person and a successful business isn’t the holy grail. Anyone can have this, but balanced success requires intentionality.

Back in the day, dealership agreements were territory-based. You were THE dealer for a product in a city. But, as the industry grew, they started dividing up those territories, making them smaller and smaller until there was no longer any territory — there were 2, 3, 4, or 40 dealers for the same product in the same city.

So, dealers started adding more products as they lost territory. They assumed that more products equaled more value to the buyer.

But it doesn’t.

I doubt you can name anyone right now that is still doing this strategy successfully… except Amazon.

Why?

For the rest of us, product is not a strategy.

We ask these “what if” questions because they grant us insight. The more time we spend in these types of questions, the better understanding we’ll have about what our strategy needs to accomplish for us.

These questions help us understand what people think us from the outside, a.k.a. our “branded perception.”

Developing a strong strategy begins by understanding what you’re already doing.

With strategic questions, there are no wrong answers. There are just answers that guide us towards developing a strategy that works.

So, think about how you handle new business opportunities as you answer these two questions:

Updating your strategy is no small task.

In fact, it’s not really a task at all — it’s a journey. It’s more than a to-do item on a weekly agenda.

Creating a strategy is a process of discovering who you are as a company and how to best serve your customers.

If you want to update your strategy the right way, you need to answer these six questions about yourself and your organization before you get started.

We have to understand that strategic planning is engineering what we want to happen based on what we think will happen, and we have to have a firm grip on both of those things to be successful.

That’s because strategy is not the actions we take; it’s the reason we take them.