Ep 10: What We Get Wrong about Strategic Planning
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Camille: Today we're gonna talk about what we have been talking about: planning.
And, planning is just a core, essential component to running your business. So we're obviously gonna be talking about that a lot more from a lot of different angles. We've also talked about problem solving, how that's connected to planning.
So today I wanted to take this up into a bigger picture perspective, which is the concept of strategic planning for businesses and maybe strategy alone as a concept and what that means. Because I think it's misunderstood and undervalued. Which those can go together.
If you don't understand what it is, it's easy to undervalue. Yeah. I don't even know what that is.
Value it by accident.
Right. I'm like, I guess it's not important then, cuz I don't even really know what it is.
Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it.
Big companies have a whole VP of strategy doing that for them and running that show. Not that that always goes well.
But small businesses don't have any of this, and I have seen that it's so important for small business owners to understand this concept just as much as a big business, if not more. Because you are small and every decision you make has a much bigger impact on your business than a big business.
A big business has a little bit more room, let's say, financially, to make some mistakes than a small business owner. If it's just you or just you and a few people, every decision feels like it carries this huge weight, cuz anything could set you in the wrong direction and, you know, take your business down. You're worried about.
So I think that this concept of strategic planning can be really helpful to think about how to actually make better decisions and how to accelerate your path towards whatever your goals are for your business. So today maybe the focus is just understanding what it is and why we care about it.
Yeah. Like why did small business care about it? That's really what I wanna get into.
Yes.
How does sound George?
That sounds
great.
So I was gonna ask you if you have in all of your, I'm sure you have this and all of your work experience, a good and or bad example, I would love one of each if you can muster it up in your brain of when a strategic planning and execution in a company went really well and why that happened? Or maybe not so much the why as the, what that looks like. Like what did that do for the company?
And then when it went badly and that you were just like, Oh no, and here's the bad things that happened.
I want to answer
that right now. And I have an example for each, one of which doesn't involve any company I've ever worked for, but I think as a classic example applying strategy to benefit the company. And I have a bad example that's not, well you'll see, I'll give you the bad example first.
Okay.
One of my pet peeves about people using the word strategy is they usually confuse it for the word important, which are two different things. And I'll give you an example.
So I work in this business development organization where we work with partners and we're combining our technology with theirs, and we're trying to sell together. And the whole idea is that when we work with partners and we find something to create and sell together, we want it to be repeatable and scalable.
We don't want snowflakes. We don't want like one off things because we deal with hundreds of partners. If we did a bunch of one-offs, that's no good. It wouldn't help us. So repeatability and scalability is what we're after. Every once in a while I'll get. Somebody from our field sales organization who comes to us and says, Hey I'm trying to close this deal.
It's a a hundred million dollar deal and I can close it if I get this partner on board. The customer's told me they need this partner to work with our technology. Can you help them? And I'll say like, why do you need this? And he says, Well, you know, this deal is strategic.
It's a hundred million dollars. And when I ask more about the deal, that deal, that customer, it's a hundred million dollars. So it's a lot of money, but that deal is not going in the direction that our company is taking us. So, for example, our company is oriented our services more toward the cloud and these guys, maybe it's a big mainframe deal, just the opposite of that.
But he's confusing strategic with important. Like do it because it's a strategic deal is not a strategic deal. It's a lot of money, but it's actually distracting us from our direction. It is the opposite of strategic. It's important, not strategic. Okay. So I'll end my ran there. Before I do my other answer, do you have comments on that?
So two things occurred to me as you were talking about that, that I was like, Oh yeah, I think I share this same pet peeve and I had forgotten about it. Because one is that the idea that money is strategic in business.
It's a hundred million dollar thing, and so that means it's strategic. That's basically what they're trying to say. That makes it important and strategic. Yeah. So making money is not a strategy in your business. That's problem number one. The other thing that made me think of was there are a couple of different types of companies that I've worked for and with where safety is the paramount. Okay. Healthcare, huge. That's everything. And so people would use patient safety as that same thing that you're talking about to make everything sound important. No, my thing's really important cuz it's related to patient safety.
Nobody's supposed to say no to that, right? Yeah. They're supposed to go along with it. And like anything that we do in life, anything can be turned around and weaponized or used in a nefarious way. And I think that can be some of the danger and might be some of people's experience with strategic planning or strategy or goal setting or anything like that, that might make them hesitate because they've had this kind of experience where they're like, Oh no, it's just gonna turn into that moras of meaningless things to do, that people are gonna use as an excuse for their own agenda.
George: For me to be clear about this, a hundred million dollars is a lot of money and we should pay attention to it. It's okay for him to say it's important, but it was the nature of this deal, like I said, was really not taking us in the direction the company's gonna go.
So my response to him, find a different set of people to help you with that. Spend some money on our consulting group that can handle one off cases all the time. You're not gonna get this for free, but you're gonna get a hundred million dollars outta the deal. But do not claim as strategic just to get my attention.
You'll get your attention if the deal is really that big,
Camille: just be clear, you know?
Yes, yes. 100% agree with that.
So my
George: example of good strategy comes from Microsoft and it's this famous historical example. I think it's one of the clearest examples of what I think of a strategy which is tying reacting to your vision of the world in a way that's gonna make you successful.
So famous story about Microsoft in the nineties when Netscape came to be, and they just came on by storm. And really Netscape was important and popular because they really based their work on these emerging internet protocols. They made the internet home friendly basically. And they grew like wildfire and they're growing so quickly that some smart guy at Microsoft just realized we have a threat.
He could see the future. He could see over time what we're doing with all of our tools, office and Windows really didn't have the internet as a core component of what they do. They didn't really think about connecting with the network.
But this guy wrote this famous internal memo, I think you could look up on your favorite search engine type, Microsoft Internet memo. I think it was pretty much that he wrote to Bill Gates, who was still CEO at the time and all the senior staff and said, we have a huge problem here.
The world is becoming more internet friendly. It's becoming a thing. It's going to be built into everything that we do, and none of our products are dealing with it right now. We need to change our direction now, and be internet friendly and his vision and his ideas about what we need to do, the strategy to react to that vision caught. And Microsoft indeed did pivot in a massive way faster than you would've thought because you know the fear of God in them. And they started finding ways to include networking the internet in all their products.
That's where the Internet Explorer browser effort came. They poured a lot of money into their own browser and then choked the air out of the room for Netscape. So they got into legal trouble.
But their strategy was right, and their strategy came from this guy having this vision of what was gonna happen in the tech landscape that was gonna be non beneficial to them. They reacted by thinking, okay, if that's how it's gonna be, what do we need to do as a company? How do we need to change how we do?
And so they built this strategy that reacted to that, and indeed they succeeded. I think it's a great example of a company getting strategy right. Do you know the story? Have you heard about this?
Camille: Yes. As you're talking about that, and it's making me think of the story that's on the other end of the spectrum of that is the Blockbuster story.
Oh yeah. Okay.
That's classic strategy gone bad, which is basically we never changed our strategy as the landscape changed. Whatever was going on internally that caused them to not make the change, that's the story of the opposite of what you're talking about.
One of the things that people miss about strategic planning is the process of thinking strategically in your business is about continually looking at: am I on the right path or do I need to change this path? Do I need to change direction? Is there something happening that means I need to adjust what I'm doing in the business right now?
And the process of strategic planning is where you do that. And it's not just once a year, I'm gonna see if I'm in the right place.
Like this guy was at the point where he realized, Oh, this is a problem. We need to do something now. He didn't wait for the annual meeting and the adjustment of the plan. He started having the conversation right then.
And I think that's another important aspect when you think about strategic planning is as a business owner and as a small business owner, it's really hard to get to that level of thinking often in your business. And this happens to a lot of business leaders too, because a lot of the people in business who get into leadership roles, they get into them because they're very good operationally at what they do, and they get promoted.
But what doesn't happen in that promotion, especially in small businesses, but big business too, is that those leaders aren't then also taught how to think strategically, given time to think strategically taught how to be good leaders, and they're expected to just suddenly be those things. But not everybody is.
I've noticed that a lot of leaders usually trend on one side or the other. They're very good at the tactical operational stuff, but not so good strategically. And then other leaders, they're great visionaries, they motivate the heck outta you, but they're not good at executing.
Yeah.
And you need a nice combination in your company, but you also need to recognize which one you.
Very few people are good at both. As a small business leader, unfortunately, you do have to kind of get good at both.
And a lot of entrepreneurs tend to be the big idea person. And then they struggle. They're like, I'm great at coming up with ideas, but following through on any one of 'em is hard because I get bored in the process. Because once you're executing an idea at some point it does get a little monotonous. Like, I have to just keep persisting for this idea to actually start to have some returns. That can be one angle of the problem for an entrepreneur who's a big visionary.
On the flip side, others are great at getting the work done, but they're just getting work done and it's not focused around a strategy.
I've had business owners that when I get them to like write a vision, they're really struggling to do it. They write down work to do, not a vision of a company.
For small business owners, the first thing to really think about as we are talking through all of this is, does one of those feel easier to you than the other? Is it easy for you to dream up really cool visions and ideas, but you realize like, wow, I do struggle to actually see that all the way through. And before I finish, I wanna move on to the next idea.
Or are you the person who's chugging away, you're great at doing the work and working the plan, but you don't have a really clear, big, long term vision for where is this all going? Where am I headed with all of this?
Yeah.
Just knowing that about yourself I think is really helpful as you go into this process.
You can bolster either one of those, so if you're weak in one area, you can definitely improve the. other That's basically why I exist is how do I help people get better at one or the other?
That's the fun part for me is which one are they good at and how do they help them with the spot that they're weakest in to just raise it up enough to really kind of balance things out.
These are great examples to think about where do you think you would trend more?
George: Yeah, as you're telling me this, I can think of people very easily who pop up are clearly one or the other. Individual contributors who've worked for me before who could benefit from that awareness alone would put them ahead. Yeah, I like that thought.
Camille: It's great. Yeah.
For anybody who's leading a team, if you're just leading a small team of people, to recognize that about those people.
This can cause leaders to make a mistake in not wanting to include their team in the process of coming up with strategy cuz they recognize that the people working for them, they're not strategic thinkers.
So they're not including them, which is a mistake. Just because they're not strategic thinkers, doesn't mean they shouldn't be included in the process. But knowing what kind of input they're gonna give you is important to know. You still need that information, and you can help them think a little more strategically by the questions that you ask.
This isn't black and white. This isn't to say you're either good at strategy or not, or you're good at execution or you're not. It's to understand that there are two ends of this. You need both in your business to run well, and having an understanding of where you or other people in your company live within that is critical to you then figuring out the right path forward with working with what you've got.
Yep.
So what was your question before I asked you my question?
Why care?
George: Why do we care about strategy?
Camille: Why do we care?
Yeah.
Yeah. Why do we care, George?
George: It gives you direction for one thing. You have a strategy, you can apply every decision that you think you need to make to that.
And ask yourself, okay, I'm thinking of doing this. Does that match where I've decided I'm gonna go?
That's a helpful tool right there that really cuts down the amount of bad decisions or amount of unnecessary work you would do if you just have a guidepost, I think for one reason.
Camille: Yeah, but I don't wanna make decisions, George. I just wanna go by the seat of my pants. Why can't I just do that? That would be so much easier.
Yeah,
George: how many hours are you sleeping a night
Camille: doing that.
I don't need to sleep. That's what makes me so good at what I do. I just work 24 7 and I just do all the work because I don't wanna put all my eggs in one basket.
You
George: know that two week vacation you wanted to take and you wanted somebody
Camille: else to take over business?
I can work on vacation. I just take my laptop with me.
But
George: you're a a cus
you're an in person customer business.
You're
Camille: Oh, okay. Maybe not the people.
George: Yeah. Yeah.
Camille: I mean, These are some of the struggles, right?
If you don't have a direction for your business , I think you're kind of like flirting around with a hobby or something. A business has got to have direction. Even if that direction is the wrong direction, I think that's one of the biggest fears is what if I picked the wrong path?
It's okay, you can change the path. That's what you were just describing in that Microsoft story. Yeah. You realized, oh wait, this isn't the right path anymore. We've gotta adjust. You're the boss. You get to decide where you pivot, when and how. But you still need to pick a direction because I think without that you do end up in the, what I was just ridiculously, you know, arguing devil's advocate for, which is like, no, I'll just do all the work.
Right. That's just easier than making any kind of decision. So as you're picking that direction, is that being the core thing? I think what else shows up in the reason, you know why we should care about it is it is forcing this examination of your business. So some of the why should we care about it?
Also can equate to . And then therefore, why we don't wanna do it. It's forcing examination of your business. You have to challenge your own thinking and biases and assumptions about things. You have to start uncovering flaws in your own reasoning in order to make smarter decisions. That's painful.
I might have to look at where I've maybe been doing it wrong. Or I have to examine my business in what's not really working well.
So this is an important place to, right now, in your brains, separate you from your business.
You are not your business. So if you're examining your business and there's things not working well, that's not a reflection on you business owner. That's what's happening in your business, and every business has it.
There's no such thing as a business that doesn't have things that aren't working well, that upon further examination you're like, Ooh, that's not pretty. We should fix that.
Knowing that as you find those things, it's the idea that I would need to find the problems cuz those are opportunities for me to make this business better and get better returns.
Which when I say that, of course we just mean more money in your bank account, which is the whole point of the business, right?
It's easy for us to shy away from that, especially small business owners who don't wanna look. But it happens in big business too, right? Where I don't really wanna look at all those problems.
I just wanna work on all the fun stuff going forward. And it can be hard to self-examine, cuz we do take it in as, I'm responsible for that and that feels bad.
Yeah.
We essentially, as humans know the value of self-examination and why we should do it.
It just doesn't make it easy to do.
George: This is a theme that you've mentioned most of the podcast episodes so far, the self-examination and reflection. It's just a recurring theme has come up all the time. I like
Camille: that.
It fits into my approach to the work, which is that wheel of improvement that we talked about. The plan, do, check, adjust. Everything's gotta be in that cycle. And your strategic planning process is no different.
It is a plan, do, check, adjust process constantly. Without that continuous improvement mindset and cycle you're missing out on a lot of opportunity. That's how you grow faster. That's how you do it with less chaos and overwhelm of work.
All the things that you struggle against as a small business owner, this is a path to reducing all of the mess and getting that clarity and that consistency that you actually want. But it has to start with you as the business owner.
George: I can well imagine somebody hearing this or thinking about strategy and thinking in theory, that sounds good, but like, don't you need a degree in strategy? I'm not sure that I could learn it.
Or, look, I gotta admit I don't even really know what that term means. They don't even know where to start. You know what I mean?
Camille: Yeah, I do. I was thinking the same thing, maybe you convinced me that it's important, but I don't even know if I'm capable. I don't have an MBA. I don't know how to do this.
And so what I would say is this: you absolutely are capable. I watch people figure it out all the time. In fact, most of the business owners I work with, once I start asking them the right questions, they realize they had a strategy all along.
Yeah. They just didn't define it. They, they had left out maybe a couple of key decision points that they hadn't thought of, but once we got to them, they went, Oh. You're right. I have not been making that decision. I need to make that decision. And so they're like this close to having a really good strategy.
I'm saying this close and making a visual, like it's not a podcast. My fingers are an inch apart. We're like an inch away. They're almost touching. They're just an inch away from figuring this strategy out. But nobody had ever walked them through the process. They'd never done that. So you can learn how to do this.
I'm not gonna say it's easy though. And I hesitate because my job is to make this stuff easier for people, which I do, but I'm never gonna tell you it's easy because making those kinds of decisions, they're hard. But that's your job as a business owner. If you're not down with making those kinds of decisions for a business, then you probably shouldn't be running a business.
Because that really is your job. You need to make decisions about what direction it's gonna go and how that whole plan is gonna play out and what your business is gonna do.
Cuz your business by itself can't figure that out. It's just a business like it's not thinking for itself. So you have to do the thinking for it right? It's a little machine and it's ready to go and it's ready to be the money machine that you want it to be, but not if you don't tell it: do this, not that. And if all you do is tell it, make me money, it doesn't know how to do that.
No.
As its own little machine, it's just like, I wanna make money, but I don't know exactly how you want me to do that. So if you're struggling with that, why isn't my business making as much money as I want it to make?
Or why isn't that going as smoothly as I want it to go? It's probably because there's some element of strategy and systems building in your business that's missing.
And a lot of times that's really hard to see on your own as well. So this is where business owners have to also get into that mindset of , I'm not doing this on my own.
I see this a lot too. Business owners struggling with feeling like they should be able to do all this on their own. Like, I chose this and now I just need to figure it out. Well, figuring it out doesn't mean not asking anybody, or not researching, or not seeing what the experts are saying.
So I googled this at one point to just see, I wonder how people are defining strategic planning or just strategy and oh boy, it can get messy fast. So you do have to pay attention to your source for information. So most of when I talk about strategy, I'm talking about it from the perspective of what I learned from Lean Performance improvement and also from Harvard Business Review articles.
So Michael Porter is a renowned strategy dude, you guys can Google him. I'm sure he would love to be called a strategy dude. I want that title!
I do too.
So you do have to pay attention. Don't just take whatever some blogger out there said about strategy because they're messing up the definition, and that's part of why this feels hard.
So know that it looks harder than it is because people have made it confusing and it doesn't have to be that hard.
Cool.
George: You're saying it's not easy, but it's
Camille: learnable.
It's learnable, yes. And it's worth learning. So even though it's not easy, guess what that also means? What is the saying about anything worth doing?
Yeah, takes effort. There's a saying like that.
I'm really good at knowing there are sayings for things, but not what the actual saying is. So people will get used to that. Katie will find out what the actual saying is and she'll like plop it in somewhere.
Cool.
For strategic thinking, for strategy, developing strategy and business it's not easy to do, but the payoff is huge and it's long term.
It's not just this short term kind of, oh, that felt nice. If you do it right, it really has long term benefits for your business and that's the important thing to remember. So it's absolutely worth getting into. And unfortunately, what usually happens is businesses go about their business without one, and then one day they're like we're kind of a mess. We need help.
And it turns out they realize, we need a strategy, we need a plan. And we haven't had one, we've just been winging it.
I think this came up when we were talking to Jim and he was saying get ready to get ready.
Yeah.
It's one of those kinds of ideas, like, do the work before you feel like you need it, cuz you do need it now. It's just one of those things that might be hard to see upfront.
George: Makes sense.
Camille: So what next? Maybe it would help if I talked a little bit about the pitfalls to avoid when you're doing some strategic planning.
Oh yeah.
And then I also have a way that I can help people with this if they're interested.
So some of the pitfalls to avoid when you think about strategic planning is don't make it just a once a year process. That's a nice cadence that we build into life, right? So if you're not doing it at all, at least do it once a year, but to do it better, you do it more than just once a year.
Back to the cycle of the wheel of improvement, right? You wanna constantly be doing your plan due, check, adjust with a strategic plan.
One of the other pitfalls I see is when companies just make it about the numbers. It's kind of the example that you gave earlier, George, of, because I've put this big dollar amount on it that's the strategy. Making money is not a strategy. It's why your business exists, but it's not a strategy.
You need a strategy for how you want to make money.
And so back to that example, it was okay, but there's this how we've decided to go after a hundred million dollars? Are we gonna pivot because it's such an opportunity that we should change our strategy to that?
These are decisions that you would make, but especially with a small business you are tempted to chase after every opportunity to make money. But that can lead you to a business that doesn't function down the road because you've just chosen so many different ways to make money, now your business isn't about anything.
So it might be short term game, long term.
Yeah.
Cause that stuff doesn't stick. So don't make it about just this numbers game, this money game.
Also don't confuse strategy with planning. You need both. And they are dependent on each other, but they are different things.
The strategy is you making decisions about how you're going to do something. It is about the approach and not the tools. It's about this unique set of activities you're gonna do to create this value for your customer and for how you're gonna operate your business. It's the how, not the what.
The plan gets into then what am I gonna do now? But you can't say what the what is without knowing how. So that's why they're dependent on each other. And the strategy without the plan is also nothing cuz it's just pretty like words on paper. But it means nothing if you don't have a plan to execute that. So they're dependent, but they're not the same. So that's an important distinction to make.
I also see companies make this mistake of thinking that strategy actually starts with the goals. Now it's pretty common for that to happen, and it's not horrible, but your ideal state is you start with the strategy and then you design goals that support that strategy.
Absolutely.
These goals will measure my progress towards achieving this strategic end. But if you're starting with goals and you're not sure how to flip that, that's okay. Don't not do goals, but just know that you're ultimately trying to get to another level of strategy before goals.
So if you're a business that has employees, sometimes strategy is just secretly up here. I have a client right now where that's happening and we're realizing, Oh, you haven't shared that whole beautiful strategy with the rest of the org. Let's get that out there. So you don't wanna do that.
The last part about this, I think is the most important one, which is: if you are doing your strategic planning process, you've got to be willing to take calculated risks and place bets. That's the scariest thing about it for business owners. But the key here is it's calculated. It's not a random risk.
It's educated, right? But you are placing a bet that this is the right direction to go. It's kind of like you're testing out this hypothesis, and now I'm gonna go find out. And then if it's the wrong direction, you get to change that.
But you've gotta pick a direction to find out in the first place.
One of the hardest things in strategic planning is deciding what you're going to say no to. So Michael Porter has this great quote: The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
I love that thinking because I think it's essential if you go into it thinking about what am I choosing not to do?
So what am I gonna focus on my energy on? Then that means your energy's gonna be focused on, this is the accelerator, right? Oh, I just said no to a bunch of stuff, which means I can spend more time on this one thing I've chosen to focus on. Guess what? It'll go faster and it'll be higher quality and all the things you want.
Because you focused on one thing. Also, one of the hardest things for humans to do.
Absolutely.
We wanna do all things. So those are my thoughts about pitfalls. Anything else you wanna add to that, George, that I
George: missed?
This all sits very well with me. I wanted to make a comment about the strategy starting to resign at the top, cuz as you're talking about that my blood was starting to boil.
It's like, no, I'm, I'll have an analogy. My analogy here is having a strategy reside only at the top is like a bunch of people in a boat, and the person at the front of the boat is the only one who knows where you're going. Nobody else knows where they're rowing. Like how are you supposed to get speed and coherence?
You can't. You gotta tell everybody, look, that's where we're going. Start rowing. Then they know.
Camille: Yes. And if you're a solorpreneur out there thinking, that doesn't matter for me. Yes, it does.
It does. It does.
It does. Because one, you need to tell yourself what direction you're rowing. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but it shows up all the time where I see solorpreneurs out there and they've got a direction they're going and suddenly they're often another direction.
And it's like when you have your CEO hat on and you're doing your strategy, you are of one mind. When you're then the doer in your company, you're of another mind. And it's really easy to get off.
So you need to make your big plan, not just sit at the top of your CEO head, but you need to have it be visible and out in front for you to remember, am I still tracking to the thing I committed to myself to do? Or am I now getting off track?
And inevitably you do have people that you're relying on to run your business. It could just be a virtual assistant, it could be any kind of support that you have. It could be just your spouse who you're hoping is supporting you in running this business.
Sharing the plan with those people is so helpful. I know some of you're like, Oh, it's silly. Why would I share that with a virtual assistant? You need to share some level of direction with anybody who's engaging in your business because it will change everything about how they engage in that work with you for the better.
No surprises. That's basically what the rule is. Just no surprises for anybody.
Yeah.
George: I have a metric or rule of thumb about this, like if you have people work for you, if you want them to make any independent decisions at any level whatsoever, they need to know your strategy.
Yes.
Any independence.
If you want just robots who have no independence, it's fine. Don't worry about it.
Camille: Nobody wants that. Well, and this also plays into if you want the people who are supporting you and your business, your employees or your contractors or whatever, if you want them to do the work the way you want them to do it.
Yeah. Which is usually the hangup we get, which they didn't do it the way I want it. Well, guess why? Because they're not inside your brain and you didn't share enough for them to be able to do it. So you do have to share , here's my strategy, here's my approach. The how I need to share, the how of how I want things to happen if I want them to be able to step up to the plate and do that, even remotely come close to that.
So hugely important in all layers, in all ways in your business, even for you solorpreneur.
Any last words about strategy from my wise brother?
I mean,
George: I'm convinced.
You know, I don't hear it from a, so entrepreneurship or a small business perspective. I see the problems from big enterprise, but everything you're saying kind of rings true to me. It is something you really need to learn how to do, and I agree with you that it's teachable.
I would just remind people, strategy is a big, important word. It's an important sounding word. I think people like to attach that word to themselves to make 'em sound smarter or more important.
It's doesn't have to be like that. It's something that's not easy to do, but is totally teachable and you gotta do it. You're right. I completely agree with you.
Camille: Phew. That's so good. What would we have done if you disagreed with me? That would be a whole other podcast we had. Longer podcast. It'd be like delete! I think I'll do this one without George today.
I think you're right though about how strategy gets used in some nefarious ways or just some erroneous ways. People are just misusing that term and what it means, and it gets easy for us to just then avoid it because it's too confusing, right?
So I wanna demystify what strategy is, and I want people to really understand that they can do it, they need to do it. And once they start doing it, it's almost like once you see it, you can't unsee it anymore. So I just need you to see it and I can show people what it looks like and how they can figure that out in their business.
And then just like everything else, it's something you just start to get better at as the more that you do it. So you just have to start doing it. The sooner you start, the better you'll be. Things just really start to click once you start to see it differently.
So I encourage everybody to go in and figure it out, or come with me and figure it out.
I have this one last quote by Jim Ro, who's another entrepreneurial guy. A lot of people might know him. He'd written a lot of books. I know I give these guys great titles, right? I mean, they're just dudes, but, you know, they have some good stuff to say.
So he says, and I like this quote, He says, Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy. And this is coming from an entrepreneur mindset.
So he says, You might know how to succeed, but more importantly, what's your plan to succeed? Hm. That kind of gets at the heart of it.
You need to understand the direction that you want to go. You need to make those decisions because you just doing your skill, whatever you're good at in your business over and over again is only gonna get you so far. It might get you off the launching pad, but if you wanna keep going to the moon, you're gonna need a much bigger plan and a strategy for making that happen.
That's what we're really about. Long term sustainability of the business relies on a solid strategy.
George: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: Awesome.
All right. That's all we have for today.
Cool. That was great.
Thanks George. Thank you for sharing your examples. Those were fantastic. Oh, very relatable.
I know. Sorry about that.
That
George: was good. It's good to get it out.
Camille: I know it was a little therapy for George today.
All right, Will, we will see y'all next week.
See everybody.
Camille:
