How to Execute Your Business Strategy On the Tactical Level

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome back to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. You're in for a treat today because we're actually going to not just talk about some higher level ideas about how we should be strategic with our offseason time and use the offseason to leverage it and really leverage getting things implemented in our business, they're going to make the next year incredible and really make that next year easy to gauge the results that we're getting and see results from the effort that you're putting in as you enter into this offseason.

What we've talked about in the previous couple of episodes are the grow-or-die theory, which is just that so many businesses are accepting of being stalled for years. Studies show that if we continue that, we are really heading on a path to decline, closing those doors, and failing. That's probably not what we all start out wanting for our companies.

Then right after that episode, the previous episode before this one, we talked a little bit about decision making, and not just decision making, but how do we move from decision makers that may suffer from decision fatigue and the effects of that, especially as busy stressed business owners, leaders with so much riding on us to more strategic decision makers? Because that is when a lot of this stuff happens, it's during the offseason when some of those weightier decisions are actually happening.

If we have more strategic processes in place to help us be not only better at making decisions but maybe even eliminate up to 50% or more of the decisions that us and our team even has to make, therefore eliminating opportunities for bad decisions, poor decisions, inefficient or voided decisions that should be addressed, imagine what your next busy season could look like where they would be operating with the destination in mind and know that they can get there and they can quickly make smart decisions that are going to move you towards those strategic outcomes that you're looking for.

We're actually going to get into the meat of that a little bit today. We talked a little bit last time about strategy versus tactics. We're all deploying tactics in our businesses. It's the things we do every single day. It's getting payroll out, it’s getting the crew out on the field, getting the job done, cleaning up after a project, it's having meeting with our management teams. It's every little thing that goes into our business.

It's what our sales team is doing, the calls that they're making, the events that they're going to, and attending, who they're targeting. If you're on social media, every single post and thing that you put on social media is a tactic and tactics take time, they take effort, and we're usually paying people to execute those.

So why wouldn't we want to have a process in place to ensure that every single action and tactic that we take actually moves us in the direction of that strategic objective and those outcomes that we want? But if we don't map that out, we don't know what that is, we don't communicate it, and really implement it so it's ingrained in every single member of our team, we can't expect that to happen.

What could that look like in your business? This is something that you could put together and put in place during this offseason and have operating very smoothly and efficiently, and have everybody on board with by the time you hit your next busy season.

Let's talk through what this could look like. First off, what I want to remind you of is a really critical question, almost a litmus test question. As a matter of fact, we use it in the litmus test questions that sometimes we provide as part of the framework that I'm going to map out for you here in a minute. That question is what is the strategic objective or the outcome that you want each tactic to progress you towards? What is the strategic objective or outcome that each tactic that you deploy, every tactic that every team member deploys should get you progressing towards that objective or outcome?

Let's think about what kind of questions we might want to be asking ourselves to get there. Early on, when I'm doing strategy work on behalf of a client, it goes much, much deeper, but ultimately, what have you accomplished? What do you want to accomplish? Are you building a legacy business? Are you wanting to double your business? Are you wanting to see a 10% growth year after year on average? What are the objectives that you're looking for?

Another critical question that I look at, and there's a lot more of them, we won't get into all that but when I'm developing strategy, one of the things I want to know is what is the perception that you want to have in your marketplace? That's with your customers, that's with your competitors, that's with your partners, that's with everybody. The entire marketplace, everybody that makes up that ecosystem, how do they perceive you?

You have to do research. That usually means actual interviews and surveys to collect that data. But then also how do you want to be perceived in that marketplace? There can be a lot of different approaches to this. If you think about the Ford versus Ferrari approach, they had absolutely different approaches to how they wanted to be perceived in the marketplace.

That dictated their strategy and it dictated every single decision that they made after that strategy was developed. That's why both of those brands are incredibly successful, but incredibly different and unique from one another.

If we go into this a little bit further, and we really think of the questions that we might be asking ourselves that get us closer to which tactics we might be executing, here's a couple more for you to think about: Would you like to be trusted in your industry by your customers, your partners, even your competition, would you like them to still say, “Yeah, if I'm honest, they're really a trustworthy company. They do what they say they're going to do. They're pretty tough to beat on that”?

Do you want to be represented and how do you want to be represented? That's going to dictate your hiring, your training, and your development decisions inside of your company. How do you want to be represented in the company? How do you want to be represented within associations? What associations are you going to join? Are you going to be active on committees? Are you going to have team members that are active on committees? Are you going to be a vendor at these shows, but not be active on committees?

These are all strategic decisions. There's never a right or wrong decision, it all depends on what a specific company's strategy is that has been flushed out in advance. Do you want to have really deep credibility in the marketplace? Do you want to be perceived as an expert? Do you want to create brand loyalty and how are you going to do that?

That question right there really shows you how if you say, “Yes, I want to have incredible brand loyalty. I wanted to even be compared to this brand out in the marketplace, or I want to really contrast this other brand in terms of that loyalty and really be generating that,” then you talk about what are the customer touchpoints, the client touchpoints, the prospect touchpoints, the partnership touchpoints that you need to implement, execute, and maybe even build a process into your business so that you do it consistently and fluidly, and people recognize that as part of your brand?

Those are touchpoints that actually also increase that loyalty and we can create tactics that also make it easy for those people, those individuals, those brands themselves, to express that loyalty back into the marketplace, which actually is a great way to have them actually doing some selling and some marketing for you.

Would you like to be able to preempt competition and really know how you are differentiated from your competition? When we're talking about strategy, a lot of times, we talk about differentiation, relevance, and sustainability. These are the three hurdles that every strategy has to get over in order for it to make the final cut.

Does it differentiate you from your competition? Is it still relevant to your customers, your partners, your marketplace? Are you able to uniquely sustain that, if it's something that you are going to be better at sustaining than your competition even better?

Do you want to generate referrals? We mentioned that a little bit earlier. It's kind of related to loyalty but what tactics and actions are you going to put into processes and who's going to be responsible for those in order to generate referrals?

We always say, “Yeah, we get referrals and maybe our business runs a lot off referrals,” but imagine if you were actually strategic about that, if you had a process and a system, and part of your sales team and your marketing team’s responsibility was to be collecting proactively those referrals on a regular basis, that right there could be all you need to get that 10%, 20% bump year after year.

Another question is, “How are you going to motivate your clients or your prospects to take action?” Maybe it's your clients to take that next step with you into another product and service, a bigger commitment, bigger projects, or how are you going to get prospects to take action?

A lot of companies don't realize that they forget this part. They spend so much time talking about their product, their features, of which I'm sure we'll be talking about in future episodes, I don't recommend that approach. But they forget to tell them how to take action. What's the next step? Give them two, three, or four steps. Tell them you want them to sign up.

At the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you I want you to schedule a call. I want to talk to you about your business. I want to talk to you about what you're going to do in the offseason and if there's any opportunity for us to connect and for me to help you meet those objectives. I'm very clear on what I want and I have to tell you that that's what I want. Listen for that at the end of this episode and you're going to hear it.

Let's start taking this full circle, but actually get really, really down into that tactical side and how you would integrate a strategy into your company. Because a lot of times, what we see is we see companies that build strategies, and then they stay in a Google Drive, Dropbox, or in a folder because we usually have some printed-out documents for you too.

We love to incorporate into our delivery, in actual marketing and sales team, or anybody, sometimes HR is heavily involved because they're going to use a lot of the tactics to deploy recruiting and retention, whoever is going to be affected by the strategy, especially the managers and the people in charge of those divisions need to be involved in part of a wrap-up meeting where we actually talk about and introduce these things.

Sometimes if we do that on a bigger scale with a company, we might have a marketing and sales sub meeting and it's actually a sales meeting where we talk about how are we going to integrate sales and marketing together.

Let's talk about how we shift from strategy and actually move down into those tactics and execution. If I were to draw you a picture here, what you'd see is you would see strategy at the very top and you would have a line down part of the strategy that I deliver. This is a tool I learned from Donald Miller, story brand and Business Made Simple University is what we call a functional mission statement.

I've kind of massaged that and made it my own based on what works best for our industry and how I like to use it within organizations because I've expanded on this and moved it down the company in order to actually distribute the strategy. We want people to really understand the strategy throughout the company. We want them to know what their objectives are. Maybe they don't know the full report, but they know what's really important and we can make sure we can really narrow it down to what matters to them.

We love to create even, we have companies that we've created little cards litmus test questions, two to three questions that they can laminate and keep on their desk or keep with them or take a shot of and keep it on their phone. Every single decision, when they're thinking about how they're going to allocate their time and their resources, they can quickly look at that and within a few seconds know, “Hey, this is not even a decision I need to address. It's a no starter,” or they have a very clear answer, they know, and they can articulate how it's going to impact those outcomes.

That's where we start getting into KPIs, metrics, and all the things that we can measure. What this looks like is we have a strategy at the top and then we move down to what we call that functional mission statement.

I love functional mission statements over those big beefy mission statements that look and feel like they were written by your legal department. I hate those. Some companies have them as part of their original business plan and that's great, but you should, everybody should have a functional mission statement.

The statement formula that I use, we'll discuss that in an episode in the future. But it's two to three sentences and it has to do with what outcome are you trying to get, by what time, and why are you trying to get it? The reason we include why is because that's how you activate your team and get them involved.

It's very, very simple. Once you have a strategy in place, it’s very simple to put that together. But what you can do is from that functional mission statement company-wide, you can actually determine for every single division of your company a sub-functional mission statement.

Before you move on from that level, you want to test every single one of those functional mission statements tested against that overall arching mission statement and make sure that it makes sense. If that division were to accomplish those things, what they set out to do, and that functional mission statement, they would actually be progressing that strategy forward and reaching those outcomes, reaching those objectives.

Then below that, every single division of your company can do this with every single member of their team. Every single member of their team can narrow down maybe the three priority activities in their job that need to be a priority in order for them to be moving the company towards that objective.

It is incredible. How efficient the company can be. We had a company who had a support staff member that helped with really a wide array of things. That was part of how the job was designed. When we went through this process, we figured out that there were really three things throughout the year that were major priorities for her. If she accomplished those and she was hired based on her ability to accomplish those specific things, it had huge, huge impact towards the bottom line of the company, and getting that progress forced, measurable results.

During those times of year, when people would come to her and give her random tasks and stuff like that, she can always bounce back to them, “Oh, I understand. I understand what you're looking for. But I'm working on X right now.” That person also knew that that's really important. That's why she's here and why her role exists. Is it more important than that? Does it need to be prioritized or can it wait?

Immediately, those people who are trying to throw fires on her lap would say, “Oh, nope, I'm good. I got it. I can handle it. Somebody else can handle it or it can wait.” It's a really great tool to help people also have ownership of their own roles, their own responsibilities, actions, and the tactics that they're deploying.

That doesn't mean that they say no to other things, that we're not all trying to help each other out but it helps us know, “Hey, maybe every single day or every single week, I have to get these three things done first, before I get on to the other things.”

If you go back to that analogy of the jar with the big rocks, the small rocks, medium rocks, the sand, all those different things and how you put them in, we all know we got to start with those big rocks. How do we help our team not only know their big rocks, their big actions and tactics that they need to be focused on, the mixture, that those are aligned with the strategy that you implemented from the very top?

If you think about this, it's incredible to think that you can really streamline all the actions, all the effort that's going into your business. I like to think of it in terms of an athlete analogy, think of Tiger Woods or Michael Phelps during the peak of their career. Every decision they made about the food they were putting in their body, about the types of practice, the amount of hours they were going to sleep, all of those things were really, really geared towards getting that outcome and those results that they wanted in their performance.

That's what really set them apart from all the competition is they always knew what their strategy was, what was their ultimate objective, their strategy to get there, and which tactics or actions actually moved that forward.

That's how you need to think about using a strategy inside your business and not just having a strategy like an old business plan from right when your company started that maybe you don't look at very much anymore, but an actual living strategy, one that every single quarter actually gets reviewed and updated. It has metrics that are informing how it's going to evolve or change.

If you've developed a good strategy, you're only having to make small minor adjustments to those quarterly reviews. But a strategy has to be able to breathe and live but it also has to be embodied by the entire organization. This gives you an idea, a visual idea of how you could actually deploy a strategy through your business and take it all the way from the strategic level to tactics.

We don't want the everyday tactics that we're just used to doing or that somebody brought in just did another job to be what we just do. We don't want our people on social media posting what they've always been posting, but they're uninformed about does that actually create maybe that credibility that you want? Does it create that trust that you're looking for?

Is it creating brand loyalty in the marketplace that is going to attract not only prospects but maybe hires and also retain people and get your people to refer other people to that company if workforce is an issue? How do you want to be perceived? All of the tactics that you deploy out in this environment really dictate that so you want those tactics to be controlled and dictated by a well-thought-out and researched strategy.

That concludes our three-part series of what to really do to leverage this offseason and get the most out of it. I hope that you're really excited about it. I hope that you are going to take this opportunity to schedule a call and talk about it. If nothing else, pick my brain, get a few insights, learn a little bit more, but also see if there's an opportunity and there's a fit for us to help you move your company along.

You can grab some time in our schedule, at storybuilt.marketing/schedule, super easy, and we also just love meeting you and hearing about your business, hearing about what are your objectives and outcomes that you're trying to get to.

Make sure you subscribe, make sure you leave a five-star review, share it with other people in the industry here with those business partners that you love having an industry, anybody out there in the industry that you know wants to build a stronger more strategic business. Let's just nail it this offseason.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.