Three Problems with Selling Strategy (But I’m Not Going to Stop)

I sell strategy, and though I’m proud of it and plan to keep doing it, selling strategy presents three problems, the first of which is that most founders aren’t shopping for strategy.

Now, founders want to buy what comes from good strategy. They want more clarity, commitment, or momentum. They want a qualitative change in their companies or even their relationship to their companies. Or, they want more leads, sales, or revenue—a quantitative change. Or, they want their team to agree on which direction everyone is going, to take a more disciplined approach to marketing, or to waste less effort going in the wrong direction.

The list of wants varies, and most of them are plump, ripe fruits hanging from strategy’s branches. If I stopped the founder of a DTC outdoor or food brand and pointed out this connection between the strategy tree and its fruits, they would say, “Of course.” You don’t stay a founder for long if you don’t believe strategy is important.

Still, most founders aren’t shopping for strategy most of the time. They’re focused on their problems. Strategy is just the means for the transformation, and because it is so fundamental, it can be surprisingly easy to forget and ignore.

So my awkward job is helping a very intelligent, perceptive, hard-working, ambitious, and committed group of people called founders to remember that they may be working harder than necessary and that a different strategy can help them get what they want faster.

Even after I convince a founder of this fundamental truth, I run into a second problem: Every founder already has a strategy.

Founders will keep a strategy that isn’t serving them for several reasons. Maybe it worked in the past and helped get the company to where it is, so replacing it feels risky. Or it may have been around so long that it is effectively invisible.

Or maybe the strategy is attractive because everyone already knows about it, and that familiarity means that the founder doesn’t have to push the boulder up the hill through education, inspiration, cajoling, and ultimatums. Keeping the strategy they already have is easier!

Another non-shocking reason founders keep doing the same thing and getting the same results is because they stay in reactive mode and don’t pause long enough to admit, “This isn’t working.”

Growth and speed aren’t always the goal, but most of the time, you know you’ve got the wrong strategy or a non-strategy if you aren’t getting the results you want, whether qualitative or quantitative.

Strategy is the path to superior results, and I end up talking to founders because they don’t have a clear trajectory or feel the excitement of being swept up and carried to a more prosperous place.

Instead, they feel a vague sense of unease or dissatisfaction. The distance between where they are and where they want to be is what pushes them to look for answers and make changes, often before they have fully expressed what they’re searching for. Again, they’re not rolling out of bed in the morning and proclaiming, “I need a different strategy!”

My role during the discovery phase is helping them fill in the brackets and blanks:

They want [fill in the blank] to be more “successful” than it is—[but what exactly does that mean?]—and though they’re grateful for what they have, they want more [well, this needs to be more sharply defined] without [because there are certainly some tradeoffs they’re unwilling to make].

Even if the incumbent strategy is pretty good, a dissatisfied founder will have trouble adhering to it because of the third problem: complexity.

Left unchecked and unpruned, every company drifts into complexity over time, and the longer an organization has been around, the harder it becomes to locate the good, clear, coherent strategy that once existed inside the riot of organic growth, abandoned ideas, and dead branches.

Over time, the strategy becomes an orchard with a hodgepodge of okay trees instead of a single beautiful specimen heavy with fruit.

Ironically, complexity can be hard to let go of because it seems more honest than simplicity. Have you ever heard about a company with a straightforward, easy-to-understand strategy and found yourself skeptical? Have you ever thought, “Surely it can’t be that simple”? I have.

We drift into complexity by default, and we believe we’re right to do it. Complexity seems more in line with the way the world works, and therefore it seems more effective. Though it is mentally taxing and it accelerates burnout, we tell ourselves that this is the price leaders pay. But is it?

My experience, study, and consulting practice prove the opposite. In every domain of life, from investing to athletics to agriculture to spirituality, a focused and ongoing commitment to a single, easy-to-explain strategy with 10x potential is more likely to produce exciting growth or a step change than an orchard of strategies, each of which has 2x potential at best.

To put it a slightly different way, we grow faster by subtraction than by addition.

If we cut ten priorities to three, we find it easier to focus. If we abandon three 2x strategies in favor of one 10x strategy, we know where to put our time. If we put a finger on the lead domino, the one thing that can start a chain reaction and make everything else easier, then we don’t have to grind so hard.

What never ceases to amaze me is how quickly founders can find the 10x strategy. When I asked the founder of a first-aid startup what the lead domino was, she told me without missing a beat that it was getting her flagship product, Nit Happens, into Walgreens. The product, which I helped her name, is now in 6,000 Walgreens stores across the United States, including Knoxville where I live.

If she had divided her focus by courting five or ten retailers instead of a single one, would she have achieved this remarkable feat in less than a year? Not likely.

Founders understand intuitively that there are better and worse pathways, and if we can reach an agreement that strategy is the means of transformation, whether they’re shopping for it or not, and if we can trim down or kick out the incumbent strategy, and if we can have the courage to prune complexity and locate the 10x strategy, then remarkable growth no longer looks distant and out of reach.

Strategy is summarizing that long, clunky sentence that I just wrote as “Let’s do much less much better.”

Remarkable growth begins to look inevitable—not because of any one person’s brilliance but because of the collective belief, focus, and commitment over time.

Strategy connects your belief to your focus, and commitment is simply focus repeated across months.

If you've read this far, and you found yourself disagreeing vehemently, get in touch.

I would welcome your rebuttal. Or, if you saw the shape of your situation in what I have written, then email me at hello at austinlchurch dot com. Let’s have a conversation about how we can get you what you want faster.