I teach online store owners how to crack the code of eCommerce success for a life of uncapped income, flexibility and fun.
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I know how sexy the notion of a ‘strategy’ is. It sounds like a magical scroll showing you how easy it is to go from A to Z in just a few easy steps.
A quick Google search tells me:
A business strategy is the set of strategic initiatives a company pursues to create value for the organisation and its stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This strategy is crucial to a company’s success and is needed before any goods or services are produced or delivered.
According to Harvard Business School Online’s Business Strategy course, an effective strategy is built around three key questions:
Many promising business initiatives don’t come to fruition because the company failed to build its strategy around value creation. Creativity is important in business, but a company won’t last without prioritising value.
Does this sound relatable to a small business?
Not at all.
Strategies are often lofty. And they often need a team to implement them.
For small business owners who might be the only person in the business, an overly optimistic business strategy can be exciting initially but quickly becomes overwhelming and unachievable.
I often get asked to help people with their e-commerce strategies in my mastermind program and from private clients. And nine times out of 10, they get opened once and forgotten about (or ignored). Because they quickly realise that strategy, while it looks great on a glossy spreadsheet, the reality of implementing every tactic is almost impossible.
I came from a corporate background, where I supported leadership teams that oversaw entire continents of many countries. We’d spend weeks in meeting rooms developing strategies for the year ahead, including goals, KPIs, etc. After the strategy was complete, it was handed down to department heads, who would then delegate the required projects to their teams. The leadership team would then monitor how things were going, crack the whip if needed, and collect fat bonuses if the team pulled it off. They weren’t the ones implementing. It was the team under them hitting the pavement, making the sales.
It’s a very different scenario when you are a one-woman show, the CEO (Chief Everything Officer), leadership team, department head, team member, receptionist, office cleaner and caterer.
This is why I groan and eye-roll when small business owners ask what their strategy should be… because 99.9% of the time, the strategy is to sell more things, pure and simple.
There are no huge expansion plans into new territories or product expansion goals. It’s ‘Jodie, how do I sell down my current inventory that’s sitting in my spare room ASAP?’.
And that doesn’t require a ‘strategy’ because the word is used in corporate big business. What you are going to be doing is implementing tactics.
Big business is not the same as a small business. It’s just not. I different approach is needed. A realistic one.
That’s why I prefer a plan or area of focus. For example, the clients in my mastermind pick a 30-day sprint, where they choose an area of their business to focus on for that month, such as optimising email marketing or list-building efforts, addressing conversion rate optimisation on their website, or scaling their paid ads.
They pick one area, set goals and a plan of attack, tidy it up, optimise and execute the plan and tactics, assess how it went and the end of the 30 days, and then if they’ve reached their goals for that sprint, they then move on to another. This makes it more digestible and more achievable, and not having them 100 things at once where then those important areas of their business only get a fraction of the attention.
If you are like most of my students and clients and simply need more sales, your ‘strategy’ is to scale sales. The first step would be to look at where your current sales are coming from and amplify that. If the majority of your sales are coming from paid ads, and you are spending $3k a month to get $10k in sales but want $100k a month in sales, your strategy would be to scale up your ad spend to be x10 what it is currently. If the bulk of your sales come from email marketing, your strategy is to get more people on your list and optimise the effectiveness of your emails.
But an important note here is you need to assess whether 1) you have enough inventory to x10 your sales quickly and 2) you have the manpower to pick and pack 10 x more orders and 10 x more customer emails. 10x your revenue will also 10x your work. So remember to be careful what you wish for. Maybe start with 2x your current spend. Then 2 x again. Scaling slowly will be a lot easier on you and will let you readjust at each level slowly.
Your strategy doesn’t have to be a 10 x slide PowerPoint presentation filled with lofty goals, KPIs and statements. It needs
References:
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