Creating a Strategy: Week 2

Determine Where You Are: Competition, Current Challenges, Initial Ideas and Aspirations

Post 2 in our 12-week series on Creating a Strategy.

This week, we focus on completing the picture of where you are today. To do this, we’ll look at:

• Your competition
• Your current challenges
• Any initial ideas and aspirations you already have for your future

This complements last week’s focus on your unique value proposition, your current customers, and your current market. If you need a refresher, check out Creating a Strategy: Week 1.

Now, on to this week:

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Competition

Understanding your competition is vital. It’s important to know who they are and why you compete with them. You need to know how they position themselves, who they target, how they price, and even their promotion strategy. From this, you can speculate what their overall strategy might be, among many other things.

Understanding your competition can help you understand how you’ll beat them. You’ll know who they are, and you can ensure you’re better or you’re differentiated.

You can also use competitive information to help you narrow and define your focus, your customers, and your own value proposition.

Start by listing who your competitors are and why they are a competitor (e.g., Are they targeting the same customer? Do they offer a similar product or service? Are they in the same market as you?) Note any interesting, unique, or relevant attributes.

Do you aspire to be like any of your competitors, or do you aspire to differentiate yourself in key ways? Note this, too.

Don’t worry about being exhaustive now. You will add and evolve this list as you progress.

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Current Challenges or Areas of Opportunity

What are your current challenges or areas of opportunity? These could be:

• Internal challenges, for example, your teams don’t want to do certain types of work, or you can’t make money on the work you’re selling.
• External challenges, e.g., maybe you’re in a competitive market, and it’s putting a lot of pressure on price.
• Complaints you’re hearing from your customers
• Challenges you are having selling your product or service to prospective customers
• White space where no one is offering a product or service you offer (or could offer)
• etc.

You’ll probably have a number of these top of mind. Write those down, and then push yourself to consider additional problems or opportunities. Whatever they are, write them down. (And remember, a problem and an opportunity are two sides of the same coin; it just depends on how you look at them.)

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Initial Ideas and Aspirations

Last but not least, write down any ideas you already have about how you might grow or evolve your business. These are the things that you talk about, think about, or often mention, e.g., “You know what we really need to do…”

They could be internal ideas or external ideas. They may be obvious, or they may be aspirational. They may be adjacent to what you already do or sell, or they may be moon shots or things that are completely disconnected from what you currently do. It’s important to get these out before we move forward into deeper ideation and exploration.

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In Summary

To create a strategy, you must first understand where you are today. That includes:

1. Defining your current unique value proposition
2. Documenting your current customers
3. Defining your current market

(Check out last week’s post to go into more detail on these.)

4. Identifying your competitors

5. Identifying your current challenges or areas of opportunity

6. Documenting your current list of ideas or aspirations

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Take a moment to review everything you’ve written down already. Is there anything missing? If so, add it.

Next week, we’ll dive into where you want to go.

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