John Wall: A lot of what we do when we’re working with entrepreneurs is talk about their strategy. And the big mistake that people make with this right out of the gate is they’re talking about the tasks that they’re going to do, and really those are their tactics. That’s not the strategy. The idea with the strategy is you’re figuring out what you want to accomplish. How is the world going to change because of what you’re doing, and then the tactics are the individual tasks that you do along the way. So a good example is your strategy could be that you’re going to Chicago, and your tactics would be, we need to find a vehicle or we need to get a plane ticket. We need to find some other way of getting there. So the tactics get used for all kinds of different things, but the strategy is unique. That’s what you’re trying to change, and how to grow your business or change the world.
Just about a year ago, the author Seth Godin did a book about strategy and changed the way I think about this. And it’s a great tip for any entrepreneur that is gonna save you. It’s gonna put you 10 years ahead of where I started out. And it’s that you need to think about strategy in three terms, you need to think about it as empathy, systems and games. Those are three things that help you write an effective strategy. Okay, so empathy is the first for example, can you put yourself as an American in the shoes of an Indian person buying reading glasses for $5 like, what is that transaction going to look like? How is that going to go? And that kind of empathy will inform your view of what your strategy is. It’s going to tell you where we want to go and how we want to get there. The second is systems. Every purchase has a system around it, and you’re trying to change those systems, but you have to keep in mind that the system is its own, its entire purpose is to resist you and to not change. So for example, you find a great way to clean swimming pools, and so you’re going around to these maintenance people, talking to them about how you can take all the labor out of it. Well, the system may be that their friends and family are the people cleaning these pools, and your product is going to put them out of a job. So it doesn’t matter if you’re more efficient, less expensive, all these things, if you’re breaking their system, you’re just not going to get anywhere. And then third is games. The idea that and this ties into our article on Pitch Anything talking about pitching things in that we don’t learn by just reading a list of features. Right? We go out and we play with a product, or we test it out, or we download a demo, or we do something. These are the things that lead us to the realization that, hey, this thing is better than the way we’re doing this other thing. And so now to get to the win for you, instead of going into these pitch meetings with your one strategy of how you see the world, take the time to develop three strategies. So if you get resistance from the VC or from the incubator group about hey, we don’t see customers spending this much money. Instead of saying no and getting into basically an argument over how things are going to go, you can say yes, we’ve considered that. We have the empathy to understand what’s going on. We’ve done our research. And if that happens, we have a path to create a cheaper version of this that will be more affordable and could go and so if you have three different pivots to go to, the important thing is you’re showing the investors that you have an understanding of the marketplace that’s beyond just what this one product is. So you’re going to be able to move. And if you have to adapt and change, you can do that easily.
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