Want Better Business Growth? You Should Harness the Power of Your Business Strategy

If you have a business or a company can you summarize your company’s strategy in two lines or less? If so, did you apply the sustainability as a management agenda in your business strategy? 

When I was sitting with one my friend who has a company offers Green IT Services, I asked him about his company strategy and how he created it when he started up the new business? 

He started talking about the concept of strategy statement and what we should do before even start doing any business and what is the road map we need to sketch out to know where we are going. I like the statement that he raised it “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” so you we should have a clear goal and objective to your strategy to let stakeholders and shareholders know what is your vision and where youe plan to reach. 

There is sentence says “You could go into business tomorrow with the goal of becoming the world’s largest hamburger chain within 10 years. But will anyone invest in your company if you have not explained how you are going to reach your objective?

He explained to me how many months he spent to draw the outlines of his business strategy to make sure that it is one with which he feels comfortable, and what we need to ensure that our strategy is compatible with the type of business we want to run and the industry in which we will be working. 

The idea was to adopt a strategy that integrated Information Technology Services and Sustainability to foster greater collaboration and offering green services in organizations. The objective was to offer unique services that make his company different from rivals by focusing on energy conservation and applying “green” service. 

Your competitive advantage is the essence of your strategy: What your business will do differently from or better than others defines the all-important means by which you will achieve your stated objective.

I admit that I love the term of sustainability and what does this term details has as my MBA was in organization leadership and sustainability.  Not so long ago, sustainability wasn’t even on the radar screen of most companies. Nowadays, we can see there are several corporations view sustainability as a strategic opportunity and are pursuing it as operational competencies.

Recently, many business leaders have begun to view sustainability as a more integral component of their business strategy, identifying opportunities and risks as a way to enhance revenue, margins and brand value. Organizations with a broader, more strategic plan for sustainability will not only drive innovation across their enterprise including transforming key processes, but may also influence what their customers want and how their suppliers operate.

For instance, Toyota’s leadership drew a different direction that placed sustainability into the core of its business strategy. Unlike Ford, Toyota was not losing money; in 2010, it reported record profits of $14.9 billion. The company has built its strategy around all four aspects of sustainability (Social, Economic, Environment and Culture). Toyota’s efforts to build a company that is harmonious with the changing needs of society led it to develop a balanced and diversified portfolio of cars. 

So the movement toward sustainability is just getting started, and a few corporate leaders are rising to the challenge. Another example comes from the home-furnishing retailer IKEA has “air-hunters,” people who search for empty space to reduce the size of packaging, and the merchandiser will stop giving out plastic bags and start selling solar panels and smart energy meters.

I would therefore say, creating and implementing a strategy will not only set the company on a clearly articulated course to growth; it will also produce positive side effects. Having a business strategy can give us the real company future shape on long term. So when you are choosing your business strategy, you should consider the future of your business as well as your current resources and situation. 

You may want to think about the long-term potential of your business strategy and how it may develop and change as your business grows. So we need to make sure that we choose the right strategy for the present, in order to ensure that we achieve the success we need now before we can think about growth and expansion into new areas of the market. 

In fact, start up a company without a strategy may run the risk of losing the company! 

I hope that I presented my point of view in a right form :)

Thanks!