“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu
Precisely 10 years ago from yesterday (October 31st, 2011), I happened to be at the right place at the right time.
I got to learn a valuable lesson in real-time about what kind of growth can happen in your business when you pair a winning strategy with effective tactics.
But before we continue let me define what each is so that we’re on the same page…
Strategy: A group of big picture decisions on where you’ll compete and how you will win.
And…
Tactics: The actual steps and initiatives you’ll put in place to accomplish your strategy.
In 2011, I was working as a marketing assistant for a guy who was selling info-products to network marketers.
His audience wanted to learn how to grow their downlines and enroll more distributors online and he (the guy I worked for, we’ll call him John) happened to be a great marketing tactician who knew how to do that effectively.
I was in charge of writing his blog posts, sending out emails to the list, setting up the sites where people could access their purchases, and more.
Up to now, John was doing “ok” income-wise. He would occasionally launch new products to his audience and they would buy them and he’d have a nice 4 to 5-figure payday. However, he didn’t really have a strategy he was working toward (at least that I was aware of at the time). So everything seemed to be done at random without a specific goal and his business had hit an income plateau.
Then one day I got an email from John.
He said he had met a guy (we’ll call him Andrew) who had a fascinating idea he wanted to be a part of and that he was going to partner up with him and asked me if I wanted to work for them.
Naturally, I said yes because I was curious to see what John was so excited about.
Anyway, Andrew had decided that he, along with John, wanted to build the #1 brand in the [name redacted] niche and he was going to do that by integrating technology to streamline some of the things that were currently being done manually.
Now, they had a strategy. They knew where they were going to compete and how they were going to win.
Then, John got busy on designing the tactics that were going to be implemented to achieve this strategy.
Fast forward one year after their launch, to my recollection, that brand did 7-figures in revenue in their first year in business.
It was great to see the whole thing behind-the-scenes. My role at that time was customer support agent so I was not involved in the marketing decisions but I did have visibility on what was going on so for me it was a valuable behind-the-scenes experience in what it takes to grow a business to that level.
I stopped working for them in 2012 and since then, I read they’ve made over $211 million in total revenue, acquired 390,000+ customers, and were doing business in over 150 countries.
A far cry from where John and Andrew originally started in their respective businesses before they partnered up.
What made the difference?
Why were John and Andrew more successful in their new business than in their previous businesses?
The difference was in pairing a winning strategy with effective tactics.
The problem with most struggling businesses is that they tend to fall in one of the two categories…
Type #1 – Strategy-focused: These business owners are great with strategy, they know exactly where they are going to compete and what strengths they are going to use to win, but they lack effective tactics. They have the best plans and ambitions but when it comes down to implementing, they lack the ability to execute effectively and end up struggling to reach their goals.
Type #2 – Tactics-focused: These business owners are great at execution. They know how to design marketing campaigns, they’re great at building funnels, they may be great at writing copy for ads and sales pages, but they lack a clearly defined goal and they tend to flail everywhere in their business because they have no idea WHERE they are going.
Which type of business owner are you?
If you’re more tactics-focused I recommend you either partner with someone who is more strategic than you, hire a strategy consultant, or improve your own strategic thinking.
Here’s a good book on strategy:
“Playing To Win: How Strategy Really Works” by Roger L. Martin & A.G. Lafley. It’s available on Audible as well if you prefer to listen to it.
If you’re more strategy-focused then you either need to partner with a good tactician, hire them, or learn & get better at implementing effective tactics yourself.
Want more?
Or want to learn effective tactics to help you accomplish your chosen strategy?
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-Eddys Velasquez
P.S. If you’re a more strategy-focused business owner and are working on your business growth strategy for 2022, but you know you lack the effective tactics to help you achieve your goals, and you want to hire someone that is great at tactics (wink, wink) 😉
Then subscribe to my email newsletter and reply to any of the emails with the words “unlimited tactics” and I’ll share more details on how I may be able to help you bust through your existing plateau and reach your revenue & business goals this coming year.