Your 2025 Strategy Needs to Be Different!

Hi!

How is your new year?

Off to a good start?

You keeping those promises to yourself?

I’m still in the middle of a big construction project at my house…so I’m shaking my fist at the clouds of 2025.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about your 2025 strategy this morning.

I’ve got five points I want to make.

To keep it simple.

1. You can’t be on autopilot.

I see this a lot of places.

People want to do exactly what everyone else is doing but a little more.

How’s this look in practice?

• “We are an expert in…”

• “We can deliver…”

• We are “faster” or “actionable” or something else…

These are all totally fine.

But they are also commodities.

They are just copying and pasting the same nonsense every other business is selling on their website or in their sales materials.

You put yourself at a disadvantage.

This is being on autopilot.

It is a fill in the blank, choose your own adventure form of strategy.

It is guaranteed to leave you feeling let down.

Not being on autopilot means your strategy is about you and the people you help.

It means:

• What does success look like for you?

• Who are you helping? Be specific.

• Why are they picking you? Again, specifically.

2. Set your own guidelines.

I went to a marketing happy hour in London last summer.

Lovely time.

Great pub.

Can’t wait to visit it again.

Love London. Love England. Love the whole deal.

What I didn’t love was how many people can’t get paid for the work they are doing.

My question is always, “What are your terms and conditions?”

I left a lot of people scratching their heads.

I explained my payment terms, and folks were baffled.

Why?

Because I always ask for a minimum of 50% to start work.

Some people pay everything at launch.

Those are my terms and conditions.

The same applies for you.

This matter if you are in a small business or a large one.

Set some rules for what you will and won’t allow.

That’s especially true for paying your bill.

3. Get really clear on why you are the right choice.

The autopilot thing bugs me.

Why?

Because people have been trained to believe that they are cookie cutter solutions to problems that folks need help solving.

So they often just use cookie cutter language to position themselves in the market.

I don’t want that for you.

I want you to be specifically you.

The way I teach it is you can wide or you can deep.

I learned this from David C. Baker’s excellent work on the business of expertise.

It stuck.

Wide is you have an expertise that you apply across a bunch of verticals.

I fit this because since I got my certificate in strategy from the Judge School at Cambridge, I’m like, “Screw you, I’m Mr. Strategy.”

That works for me.

Strategy is something businesses struggle with.

It is also something that benefits from seeing it applied in many situations.

Perfect for a broad expertise.

On the other hand, you might be super specific and go really deep.

You might love branding or PR.

You might really set yourself up as the go-to person for PR in solo businesses.

This would require you to go deep.

This is narrow.

I need you to make two decisions this year:

• Are you going wide or deep?

• Where?

You can always call Mr. Strategy.

4. Know who you are selling to.

I remember a great talk I gave in Bethesda, MD several years ago.

It was a pretty straight-ahead strategy talk but I got to the point about “knowing your customer.”

The controversial part of the talk was, “I try to spend as little time as possible with people that can only say no to me.”

It was like I’d thrown a bomb in the middle of the room because people were up in arms.

“You can’t be serious.”

“You have to talk to everyone.”

“That’s crazy.”

My answer was simple.

“I’m not rude.

I just know it is easy to spend time talking to people that can never buy from you and can’t move a sale forward.

It is comfortable.

You have to avoid that trap and focus on the buyer.

The person that can say yes.”

This is why I want you to get really clear on your buyer.

You need to focus your attention on the folks that can say yes to you.

Networking is cool and all, but you need to really focus on the buyers.

You have to be focused.

5. What actions do you need to take?

This is the key.

Strategy is a wishlist until you take action.

So…what actions are you going to take?

I don’t need to say more.

Next week, we will keep working on this.

So do me a favor, hit reply and tell me where your thinking is.

And, share this with your friends and your social media!

I’ll leave you with a picture from my house of Penny the Bulldog telling the crew what to do.

Until next week!

Take it easy!

Dave