Having a business strategy is like having a compass that guides every decision: what to do, how to do it, why to do it. Without a strategy, every choice becomes arbitrary.
Defining a strategy takes time. It requires stopping, thinking, questioning what you are doing. It is easier to continue working as usual.
But not defining a strategy has a cost: you waste resources, chase the wrong customers, build products that nobody wants. And when problems arise — and they always do — you have no compass to guide you.
There is no universal method, but there are certainly steps that help. We followed them ourselves when we defined our strategy.
Vision answers the question: where do we want to go? It is the long-term goal, the big ambition.
Mission answers: how do we get there? What do we actually do, who do we do it for, how do we do it better than others?
We don't need motivational phrases, but concrete answers.
After Vision and Mission, you need a measurable goal that will guide the business in the coming years. This is usually a financial goal: turnover, margins, growth.
Without a clear figure, the strategy remains vague.
Defining the market means answering specific questions:
— Who are our customers?
— What problems do they have?
— What do we offer to solve them?
If the answer is ‘everyone’ or ‘it depends,’ you haven't defined anything.
Knowing what your competitors are doing is no longer enough. You need to understand what you do differently — and why this should matter to the customer.
The competitive advantage is not ‘we are good’ or ‘we pay attention to detail’. It is something tangible and concrete: faster, more specialised, more reliable. Something that the customer can verify.
To analyse competition and positioning, there are established tools such as SWOT Analysis and Porter's 5 Forces model. These are not theoretical exercises, but frameworks that force you to ask uncomfortable questions and answer with data, not opinions.
The point is not to fill in matrices, but to use these tools to find where you are really strongest — and where you are losing ground without realising it.
At the end of the process, the strategy should be summarised in a few lines. Not a poetic manifesto, but a sentence that everyone in the company can understand and use to make decisions.
All other strategies derive from that sentence: financial, pricing, marketing, communication. If the overall strategy is weak, so will the others be.
Defining your strategy does not guarantee success, of course. But not defining it almost guarantees failure — or at least a lot of time wasted on things that lead nowhere.
A clear strategy allows you to say no. To not chase every client, every project, every opportunity. To focus on what really matters. And that, in the long run, makes all the difference.