As I previously wrote in The Eighteenth
Law, the entrepreneur must develop his or her skills ahead of the development
of the enterprise. We can look at specific business aspect skills; learning more about finance, management, marketing and the operations
of the business. Development also includes developing skill sets in three
important components of business planning. These skills are Analytical,
Strategic and Tactical.
Analytical Skills include all aspects of
measuring, and interpreting those measures to make more effective business
decisions.
Tactical Skills include all aspects of achieving
goals set by the company. These include
everything from performing tasks to the systems and workflows that efficiently
get things done.
Strategic Skills are the planning, goal
setting and visioning aspects of your company.
Strategies set direction while tactics get you to the destination.
To use a simple example, when you take a
vacation, strategy is deciding where to go, tactics is deciding how to get there
and analysis tells you how long it will take. These three skills are taken from
business theory; but don't let that scare you. You are already using each skill
on a regular basis. The challenge is developing skills and building on the
skills in which you may be weak. Over the next three blogs, I will shed light
on each skill, why they are important to your firm and how these skills are
essential parts of developing your enterprise.
Tactics: Most Entrepreneurs' Strongest Skill
Strategy
requires thought, tactics require observation.
·
Max Euwe, Chess Grandmaster
& Mathematician
Most of the entrepreneurs I have met have
little idea of why they are successful. They
attribute success to creativity, insight, hard work and other factors popularized
by the press. When I look at successful
business owners they do not invent a better mousetrap, but rather build and
sell mousetraps better than their competitors.
Successful entrepreneurs deliver well and deliver early. This simple fact is not exciting, but it is
the truth.
In a previous blog, I suggested that
success was more than simply hard work.
Successful entrepreneurs combine hard work with great tactics,
especially when the goals (strategies) in the early stages of business
development are quite straight forward.
Tactical thinking is essential to success…especially
early success. An entrepreneur with whom
I worked was in the solar control business.
This industry uses window tinting and roller blinds to reduce heat and
glare in both buildings and automobiles.
The owner got his start installing tint automobiles and recreational
vehicles. He was extremely good at it,
got a good reputation in the industry and built a profitable business.
He didn’t invent window tinting. He didn’t apply it to an entirely new
industry. He just found a better way of
doing thing others were not doing well, and then building on it. There are
tactics in production…finding better ways to produce your products or deliver
your services. There are marketing
tactics, ways to influence your customers in ways that help you achieve your
sales and profit goals.
The challenge, as we shall discover going
forward, is that strong tactics alone only take you so far. This comes back to the hard working
entrepreneur who works hard, but never really achieves much of anything. It is fine to have your business exist to
provide you with a job, if that is what you want. There is nothing wrong with that…in fact that
describes my own situation. Many people
want more…and tactics alone will not allow them to accomplish that goal.
Good tacticians always look for a better
way. They know that there are no best
practices, just best practices thus far.
In manufacturing they look at systems such as LEAN, TQM and Theory of
Constraints; apply behavioral event interviewing in their recruiting efforts
and apply online efforts to marketing. Smart
tacticians take from the best systems, adapt them to their unique situation and
improve their ability to deliver.
The weakness with tacticians hurt
businesses in the long run. These
include a lack of the ability to delegate, assuming their tactic is the best tactic
and failing to realign tactics when the company needs to change strategy. Firms can get stuck in a ‘tactical trap’
where the means becomes more important that the ends.
Most entrepreneurs are tactical and that is
great when both the enterprise and the economics are stable. Alas, we live in turbulent times; times that
require more than great tactics, but add analytics and strategic thinking to
the mix to develop a growing and sustainable enterprise.
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