My Winning Strategy: The first steps I took to grow rapidly

When I first started using the word ‘strategy’ instead of ‘planning’ I felt like an absolute boss!

"Let's do a strategy session Jarrod!" I'd hear myself say.

It makes me smile just thinking about how naive I was back then.

I would spend my nights mapping out business plans on huge pieces of butchers paper and then detail every part of it in notebooks the following days.

The thing is, even as I refined my lofty ideas and developed strategies, I always struggled to implement them.

I’d have vivid images in my mind about what I wanted to build, only to get derailed by a wall of challenges that comes with actually making things happen.

This continued for at least a decade as I learned things the hard way.

But it taught me some big lessons about building a team that can execute a strategy.

And for the past few years, I've been focused more on implementation than strategy to the point where I started to value it more.

But this year I was reminded of why you need both.

I read a quote recently that said: 

‘Running a business with poor strategy is like cutting grass with scissors.’ - Alex Hormozi

I believe it's about picking the things you'll work on that'll give you the most bang for your buck. Then allocate most of your time and resources to that.  

But there’re a few things you need to be clear on before you form your kick-arse strategy for this year.

Here's what it looks like for me:

1. Big vision

The bigger your dream, the more effective a good strategy is to get you there.

Thinking big also forces you to think about all the pieces stacked together to form something massive.

And because of that, you naturally try to chunk it down which is part of strategic planning.

(Instead of a small vision where you can just go and do the thing with a strategy)

2. Pick your key activities

There’s no point in becoming excellent at things that don’t matter. 

So you will need to figure out what the most important things are to do that have the biggest impact on your progress.

Ask yourself "What's the one thing I can do that would make all other tasks easier or unnecessary?"

Then do more of that.

3. Delete what’s not working

It sounds obvious, but few people do it. 

Nearly every entrepreneur I know seems to think they can keep layering on things in order to achieve their goals (me included). 

Instead, remove complexity, delete what’s not working and delegate what’s useful but not high value.

It's often about doing less.

4. Being ready for the unexpected

I never used to plan for the unexpected.

(another thing I learned the hard way...)

But these days I have built-in redundancies on key equipment, a training model geared towards not relying on one key person for critical functions, and we recruit responsive leaders who can think clearly during moments of crisis to deploy solutions rapidly. 

It’s pretty likely that reaching your goals won’t go as planned.

So accept that from the beginning and make plans for it.

5. What to use your limited resources on

As an entrepreneur or leader, you have resources at your disposal.

Things like, your team, cash, relationships, attention and the weight of your authority.

But it’s not infinite.

In fact, there’s often less of it than you need so you’ve got to decide what to focus your limited resources on to have the maximum impact.

This is where points 2-3 are critical.

6. Focus and discipline

One of the biggest things I realised is that most people already understand good strategy. Ie you can make a plan to achieve an outcome...

Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, strategy isn’t what normally lets you down at all. 

It’s often that you just don’t stick to it for a long enough time horizon.

If only you’d commit to implementing it for decades instead of a year or two!

Your success would skyrocket and your life (plus the life of those around you) would completely transform.

But there's one thing to be careful of when you set a long time horizon - Don't lose your urgency and become lazy thinking you have more time. 

Instead, look at it like this:

Build a long time horizon for your vision but compress your actions into short sprints on the timeline to keep yourself hungry and achieving.

That's it for today.

I’ll leave you with a quote from legendary military strategist, Sun Tzu: 

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Now read that again and replace the word tactics with 'key activities'.

I hope you have a brilliant week.