What Makes an Entrepreneur Twitch?

What question could I have possibly asked small business owners to get reactions of fear, anxiety, guilt?

Was it:  Did you know your bank account is overdrawn by $10,000?

Or maybe:  Is this an IRS audit notice?

Nope neither one.

The question I asked was:  “What’s your strategy for growing your business?”

As soon as the word “strategy” is mentioned, the tone of the conversation changes drastically and there's a lot of twitching going on.

Why?  Well a common answer is – “Who’s got time for strategy, I’ve got a business to run.”

Or a beautifully worded statement about where they see their business in 5 or 10 years.  A fantastic vision statement, but sorry, not a strategy.

Why all the avoidance and confusion about creating a strategy?

Because most of us have heard about, or have been involved in a corporate strategy process at some point in our career. Sadly, many of these experiences involved long meetings resulting in a fancy binder destined to never see the light of day again; and to collect dust on a shelf in our office until the next year’s strategy process rolled around.

The good news is that developing a strategy doesn’t have to make you twitch or be a waste of time.  And it's not something that only big successful corporations do.  How do you think they got to be big corporations?

In their book, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, a CEO and a business school dean, (A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin), boil the strategy process down to answering 5 questions,  two of which are key:

Where will we play?  How will we win?

I love it.  By answering these two questions, you will have described your target market and how you will get your target market to buy from you.

Strategy is about choice.  It’s about making smart decisions for your business that will make your vision come true.

I’m not going to say it’s easy to develop a strategy, because it’s not.  It makes your brain hurt and forces you to make some tough decisions.

But the investment in doing so has a far greater ROI than running your business on just a hope and a prayer.

Read Playing to Win.  Then lock yourself away and answer those two questions about your business.

Need help?  You know where to find me - The Growth Coach of Greater Chicago. Visit my website at Passion4smallbiz.com