A few years ago I was asked by a marketing person what I did for a living, I replied that I was a strategy consultant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a big word.\u201d they replied. What, Consultant?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo, strategy. No one understands what it is.\u201d I think that what he meant was that he didn\u2019t understand. I suppose it\u2019s a bit like thinking Sales and Marketing are the same thing because we say them together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Strategy is arranging, managing and controlling the many, many things you do and have in your business that make your business unique & successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have heard strategy likened to a sound equaliser when using it to create a balanced sound \u2013 think George Martin and The Beatles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Strategy cannot necessarily be described in one single statement. Many people attempt to do this by describing their strategy as \u201cdoubling sales in 5 years\u201d or \u201cachieving a gross margin of 45%\u201d. These are actually targets or measures within your business, not strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I like to break the understanding of a company\u2019s strategy into a number of distinct areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are style, operations, sales & marketing (there we go again!) and finance. Of course these will all have subsets such as people, products and premises and these subsets will appear multiple times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To understand strategy you have to understand how the component parts of your business fit together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few years ago I was asked by a marketing person what I did for a living, I replied that I was a strategy consultant. \u201cThat\u2019s a big word.\u201d they replied. What, Consultant?\u201d I said. \u201cNo, strategy. No one understands what it is.\u201d I think that what he meant was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-when-i-was-working"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/becomegood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}