Here’s How You Can Become a Strategic Leader
For a business owner or entrepreneur to become a strategic leader, there are many facets they need to consider first. The strategies listed below can be used across all business structures — from an LLC with a handful of employees to a large corporation that employs hundreds. Either way, without taking the below points into account, it’s difficult to have a winning strategy that will last long in the marketplace.
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Follow These Strategies to Become a Strategic Leader
Do you want to be a strategic leader in your business or company? If so, work on the strategies outlined below:
1. Look at the NOW as a strategic leader
It’s always important to look at the future — but in order to even see a future ahead, you also need to focus on what’s happening NOW in your business. What’s working? What’s not working? Should you pivot? Are you drowning in debt? Are you taking a loss on a weekly basis? When it comes to becoming a strategic leader, you can’t look to the future of your business without understanding where it is TODAY.
If do you notice things aren’t currently working, how do you fix them? What strategy can you implement to move the needle and turn things around? If business is great, awesome — but how do you take it to the next level of growth? Plan and strategize everything, building on what you see happening now. And make sure to have a constant focus on your daily operations so you maintain a solid grasp on your business.
2. Look at the FUTURE as a strategic leader
Once you understand where things are right now, look at the future. Plan out weekly, quarterly, annually, etc. Where do you see the business realistically going in the next quarter, two quarters, year, five years and so on? This is no different than setting your short- and long-term goals. Point number one above would be your short-term, while number two would involve long-term planning. Do you even have goals or are you winging it day by day (not a good strategy to have if you want to be a strategic leader in your business)?
Plan out your future and make sure it aligns with where you are today and your short-term goals. If in 12 months you want to be a $1M business, but you’re currently doing $10k a month in revenue, you better have a really good strategy in place to make up the difference in sales, otherwise, you’re going to fail miserably on your goal.
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Don’t be afraid to ask questions or have an advisory board who you can run things by to see if your strategy makes sense. Bring on a board who knows how to run a business and be successful. As a strategic leader, it’s your job to ensure the business grows and is profitable. No one is going to do it for you unless you appoint someone to handle that position for your company.
3. What is the demand?
Part of being a strategic leader is figuring out trends. If you can see the demand for a product or service and can come to market with a solution, you’re ahead of the game. The best businesses solve problems. And if you can solve a problem that a business or individual has, most times than not, people are going to be willing to invest (assuming your price isn’t astronomical).
The demand for a service or product ties directly into our next point which is ensuring you have the means to supply the product or service at scale when growing your account list or customers. By planning ahead, seeing trends for sales, and knowing what inventory levels need to be at, you can plan accordingly to ensure you meet the demand put on your business.
4. Building a solid pipeline and clients
When you now you have a product or service that solves a problem, next you need to make sure you have people you can go pitch. This can be through door-to-door, online marketing, cold-calling, social media, etc. Build a pipeline of prospects that you and your staff will work on closing. Being a strategic leader, you should NEVER say you don’t have anyone to call on. Your pipeline should always be full and you should have a list of people and companies you can call on all day, every day.
Then, once you land a client, ensure you service the heck out of them and retain their business. You should have some sort of structure at your business. It could be set up in many different ways. You could have people who do prospecting and then turn the lead over to someone on the sales team. Then after closing, the sales team member would hand them off to someone in customer retention who follows up and takes reorders.
The other way of the above is to simply have the same individual work through the whole process themselves. Hold them accountable to not only call on prospects to qualify, but also sell them, service them, and retain them. A strategic leader needs to understand the most efficient way to go through this process based on their individual business model and structure.
5. Hiring the right staff
The last piece of being a strategic leader is knowing where your holes are in the company. If you don’t have anyone great at marketing, fill the hole. If your sales team isn’t cutting it, hire a new sales team. If you are getting a ton of people contacting your business and it’s bogging you down or your sales staff, hire a customer service team. You get the picture. If the individual you hire will make you or save you what their salary would be, hire them.
For instance, if you hire someone to run marketing for $50,000 and they increase your sales by $100,000 that should be a no-brainer. For your $50k investment in an employee, they brought you an extra $50k in revenue. You could also outsource some of your work as well.
Either way, to scale at any level, hiring a staff at some point is inevitable. But, the key is to hire the RIGHT staff to fill any holes missing in your business so that you can grow while still being able to handle paying their salary.
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