The number one sabotager of a business strategy is simply not having one. According to a recent study, some 50% of small to medium-sized businesses didn’t have a marketing plan and 25% of those respondents had no idea how they planned to grow their business. As a small business owner, “Yikes”! For those businesses that haven’t identified their path forward, we should chat. 

On the flip side, for those businesses that actually documented their strategy or growth plan, a large number of those, 67 percent if we’re getting into the numbers, fail to execute. A report by McKinsey saw that an overwhelming 74 percent of executives don’t have faith that their strategies will succeed. If the top-level leadership doesn’t believe in it…[throws large stack of paper in the air and walks away]. So let’s look at some of the common mistakes that are made during the strategy development process that likely account for some of these failures to execute. 

Front Loading Your Strategy

This happens a lot, and it’s not surprising. We all have an “I want it now” mentality, especially when it comes to growing the business. All good things take time, and your marketing or business strategy is no different. The way you begin can make or break the final execution of your strategy. 

An example I see happen often is a company that previously had no formal marketing plan, but knows that for the business to grow and thrive they need to focus some energy there. So the business leaders sit around a table and come up with a lot of great ideas of everything they could be doing and call it their marketing plan. Then they hire a “marketing coordinator” with 2-3 years of lightly related experience and expect that person to grow all of their social channels, initiate email marketing campaigns, design some marketing collateral for their sales department, start a podcast, design, launch, and manage their digital ads… I think you can see where I’m going with this. Effort divided into trying to do everything at once gets you mediocre (at best) performance across the board, aim to do a couple of things really well, and then start adding in the other elements. 

Not Taking Time to do the Research

This is a big one, and the most time-consuming part of developing an effective strategy. As I mentioned in the previous section, often times in-house strategy development will be the leadership team sitting around the table discussing what they should be doing based on their perception of the business. In my experience, more often than not, the research phase of strategy development has revealed things that the leadership/ownership didn’t know about their own business. Whether that was the reason that people valued working with them, or that there was another company with the exact same business model on the other side of the country. 

You HAVE to take the time to do both primary and secondary research for two primary reasons. First, to make sure you understand the voice of the customer, their needs, and what they value about your product/service/company. And second, to understand the competitive landscape, so you know not only what you’re up against, but so that you can learn best practices and what others have already failed at or been successful with. 

Ignoring the Impact on People & Culture

Surprised to see this one? If you know me, you won’t be. Strategies are ambitious in nature, but this is a big reason you see the failure rate mentioned at the beginning. Often business leaders are focused on the big-picture, and while that’s necessary, it also (in many cases) detaches them from the day-to-day operations of the business. It’s important to understand the impacts that effective execution of the strategy will have on the people doing the work. 

This is where realistic expectations need to be set. For example, let’s say you’re currently a $1 million company and you want to grow to a $3 million dollar company, but you want to do so without increasing your staff headcount. If your strategy is to increase business development activity and bring on more clients and your team is already at capacity… bring on the burnout, stress, and retention issues. Your strategy needs to be more focused on getting creative with the business model, or how you offer your product/services. You may need to look at a pricing strategy and increase prices with existing customers or separating with some “unprofitable” customers that are taking up valuable capacity. Whatever strategy you choose, do it being mindful of the impacts it will have on your team, because without them the business will struggle. 

Thinking Growth Alone is the Strategy

Newsflash… Growth is not a strategy. While that may be the outcome or goal of a successfully executed strategy it is not the strategy for your business. Growth is good but you need to get dialed in on the HOW. How are you going to grow? 

A strategic planning session is designed to take a large set of ideas on how growth could be achieved and whittling that down to a few of the top that everyone is in agreement on. Then it’s getting laser-focused on each of those and creating a detailed plan that involves the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve that end goal. To give you an analogy, you have a goal that’s at the top of a ladder, and the strategy is each individual step on the ladder. One is worthless without the other. 

Not Creating A Way To Measure Success

While this seems like it would be fairly obvious, you would be surprised at the number of strategies with ambiguous goals but no way to gauge progress toward them. It’s easy to identify in general terms what you want for the future of your business, but you have to go one step further and determine how you measure if you’re moving in the right direction. 

Making sure that you have the appropriate measurements in place to gauge success on a monthly or quarterly basis will help you toward reaching your annual goals. Determining these metrics of success significantly increases the likelihood that the plan will succeed. There is no one metric that is right or wrong, it’s largely dependent on what you’re trying to measure. It might be a milestone or deadline that you want to have something completed by, or it might be a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that gives you a way to quantify performance.  

Being able to look at a business holistically and then narrow in on how you make it everything you want it to be is incredibly fun and rewarding work. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss the current state of your business/strategy. I love to watch my client's businesses grow and thrive. You can also follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, or sign up for my newsletter in the footer for more.