What the heck is “strategy” and why should any founder care?

I help founders grow what is most important to them, and that starts with clarifying and writing down their strategy.

“Strategy” is a squishy, slippery word whose definition changes based on whom you’re talking to and the book they read last. Every founder wants a good strategy, the same way they want a good brand and good cholesterol, but what the heck are we even talking about?

Let’s start with a clear definition and talk about why strategy is important.

I define strategy as the path to superior results, what you will enact on purpose. To that basic definition, I add an idea from Michael Porter’s classic 1996 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is Strategy?”:

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

You cannot walk the path to superior results if you keep getting sidetracked with lesser paths to lesser goals.

A good strategy thus has two distinct dimensions, what you will enact on purpose and what you will ignore on purpose, and to be good, the strategy must be clear and well written. It must exist outside of the founder’s noggin. It must be something someone else can wad up and throw away. The actual writing delivers most of the benefits, and those benefits are what make the strategy important, or worth having.

A strategy is important because the writing of it forces you to come right out and say what superior results are—that is, where you are headed—and to define the path—that is, what you intend to do—and to identify as many of the dead-ends, detours, and distractions as you can—that is, what you choose to not do.

If you’re particularly wise, your strategy will forgo highfalutin’ Latinate words, the pernicious ambiguity that they introduce (see what I did there), and the fabulous deck with eighty slides.

Your strategy will instead use common, one- and two-syllable words that are downright hard to misinterpret. That way, you and your team end up with an easy-to-understand strategy statement plus obvious implications and concrete actions and leave yourselves with nowhere to hide. You run the strategy, or you don’t. Either way, you know where you stand.

A strategy is also important because it focuses your effort. After you go through a robust process where you put everything on the table and commit to a path, you don’t waffle as much. The anxious part of your mind can’t discount that process or its outputs, so it quiets down for a while. You can see distractions for what they are, so you spend more time and resources running the strategy instead of spreading them across multiple competing strategies. Basically, you find it easier to build momentum.

In that respect, good strategy acts like a pair of horse blinders. Horses have eyes on the side of their heads that give them panoramic vision. This 360˚ view works well for wild mustangs on a prairie scanning for predators but not so well when people need a horse to do a job.

Blinders block the horse’s side and rear view, and the lack of peripheral vision helps it to stay calm in busy places where sudden noise and movement might spook it. Blinders also help a race or pack horse focus on the path directly in front of it.

Founders who excel at seeing options, opportunities, and threats often move faster after they narrow their vision to the single, most promising path.

I’ll end with a quick example.

In early 2026, the founder of a pet supplement startup hired me to help him with his strategy.

We did a one-day strategy sprint to set things into motion, and I kept cutting away the complexity until we arrived at a rather stark realization: “For the company to have long-term viability, we need to triple revenue.”

The question then became, “What is the most direct or obvious or superior path to that outcome?”

We answered that question, and I saw a glint in the founder’s eye, renewed conviction. Maybe he wished that his company were further along, but at least he could now make confident decisions about how to spend his time and money, about what to ignore, about what to hire for.

If you don’t have a clear strategy, you will struggle to make confident decisions.

And if you do have a clear strategy written in plain prose, you may still make mistakes, but at least those mistakes will be pointed in the right direction.

When you want help with your strategy, email me at hello[at]austinlchurch[dot]com.