5 Actionable Takeaways
Take 60 seconds to answer one or more
of the following questions -- we also highly encourage you to try this
with colleagues and/or loved ones!
- How can you leverage relentlessly focusing on your specific customer to successfully navigate turbulence?
The biggest decision every organization makes is deciding who its specific customer is. I’m a big believer in owning a niche, not only to survive, but to be relevant and credible with your customers. When market trends shift, the economy throws you surprises, and you feel pressure to react, it will challenge the essence of what you’re all about and what you believe. During these times, your north star should always be your specific customer, and how you can serve them better.
- How can you swim with the current while staying committed to your key principles?
One of the quotes I came to love as we as a business were navigating the disruption over the last few years was from Thomas Jefferson. When it comes to matters of style, swim with the current. When it comes to matters of principle, stand like a rock. As leaders, we have to discern between trends and principles on behalf of our company. Those are hard decisions, because you need to move with the market, but if you only do that you’re just going to blend into the background with all your competitors. To be distinctive, you have to own your own principles and your point of view.
- How can you utilize a one-page strategy to kickstart a business after a slump?
In the beginning of our turnaround at Brooks, it was so important for us to gain trust from everybody: employees, leadership, investors, and banks. To do this, we created a one-page strategy that clearly represented the business model and customer we thought would take us into a profitable future. When designing a strategy, you must ask yourself first, what blank space are you filling, and then, how do you make money at that? If you think about it as a grid, you’ve got competitive strategy from a customer marketplace standpoint, then profitability and asset intensity, then people and execution, and finally, culture across the top. Those elements make up your one-page strategy.
- How can you design a better medium and long-term strategy to guide your organization?
As a leader and a steward of an enterprise, I think about the business and design our strategy around three horizons. Horizon one is from now through the next three years. Horizon two is five years out. Horizon three is a ten-year vision. Great businesses do all three of these horizons well. We must challenge ourselves to try to see around the corner near, medium, and long-term corners.
Each spring at Brooks Running, we update our three-year strategy to chart the future of the company. This looks like a 15-page summary of our priorities for the next three years. Our teams use this as a basis to drive their activities–everything is linked, aligned, and integrated with the 3-year plan. To design it, we begin with our exec team of five, then expand to a larger senior team, and finally to our even larger team of directors. In the process, each layer of the organization builds their three-year plans and budgets. It has been a transformative tool for alignment for us.
- How can you better supplement your financial metrics with customer success metrics?
At Brooks Running, we review financial metrics equally and simultaneously with customer success metrics when we rate our performance. We report our full financial results, quarterly and monthly, but we additionally gather everything we can on customer metrics–from Net Promoter Score, to market share, to unit growth. I believe the financial results come from customer success. If you’re trying to win short-term, medium-term, and long-term, customer metric focus and financial focus go hand in hand.
