How we’re switching up our business strategy in 2023
This year, we are starting off with something we’ve never had before: a fully mapped-out, three-year business strategy—and it feels so good. Don’t get me wrong: We have always set goals for the company. But we have never intentionally thought about a plan beyond a year in advance.
I’m so happy to be kicking off this year with a well-thought-out, intentional plan, and I want to share it with you. A quick disclaimer: This is vulnerable for us. It’s the first time we’ve ever looked at our year this way, which means there will almost certainly be things that change. But as you know, vulnerability is kinda my thing, so I’m sharing it with you anyway! And even if things do shift in the near future, I hope you can find value in the way we created our strategy for 2023.
You might recall the post I wrote last year about the book BE 2.0 by Jim Collins. It completely changed the way that I think about business strategy, and as soon as I started reading it, I knew we needed to follow Collins’ advice and get going on a new strategy.
The first thing Collins recommends you do is get really clear on your values, purpose, and mission. For us, getting clear on our values simply meant reevaluating the values we already had. They are:
Courage: Courage means that we are determined to lead, to grow, to change, and to keep it human. We bravely take ownership; give and receive feedback; screw up and learn from it; act with integrity; and allow ourselves to be held accountable. We dare to do work that makes a difference. We live authentically by embracing who we are instead of who we think we “should” be. We ask for help; speak up; lean into tough conversations; trust first; and take an honest look at ourselves before we blame others. We go where our hearts call us.
Compassion: Compassion means that we have empathy for ourselves, for each other, and for those we serve. We respect boundaries, our own feelings, and the feelings of others. We choose honesty and hard conversations over pleasing others. We build meaningful relationships; celebrate our differences and what makes us unique; create environments of belonging; care for ourselves so we can care for others; listen with intention; make every person feel like they matter; and lead with our hearts so that we can inspire others to lead with theirs. We believe that there is nothing more important than taking care of each other. We think before we act, knowing that our actions can have a ripple effect on others.
Values are your compass for business decisions and direction, and we found that these still resonated with us really well.
Next, we got clear on our purpose. Collins says that your purpose should guide the company for the next 100 years and be your North Star: It should guide everything from your mission to your yearly goals from here on out. Our purpose is to build a community of human leaders who make the world a better place.
After that came our mission. Collins says your mission as a company should be the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) that guides the company for 10-25 years and helps you make a big dent in your purpose. Once you hit your mission, you set a new one! Our mission is to redefine leadership for our generation.
Once we clarified our values, purpose, and mission, we were ready to begin constructing our strategy. We decided to focus on the next three years and come up with specific and measurable goals for each one. Collins recommends that you focus your yearly goals on five categories: products, customers, cash flow, people, and infrastructure.
Here are our 2023 initiatives for each of those categories:
Products: We recognize that we are missing out on a big opportunity to make an impact on the world. More than 2,500 people have taken our Human Leadership Program, but we haven’t yet figured out what happens after someone graduates. How do we keep them engaged? How do we offer more value? How do we help them keep what they learned front-and-center? A big goal of ours is to figure out how to create a community that brings together our alumni and others who believe in building a more human world at work. We want to create a safe space for conversation, continued growth and learning, connection and support.
Customers: We know that we want to serve our customers by creating meaningful content that can help them build a more human world at work. But to be honest, we have no real strategy around that content creation. I follow my inspiration from day to day—and that’s that. I still want to go after what inspires me, but we need to have content pillars that drive the direction of our content and ensure that we are producing content that our audience wants and needs.
Cash Flow: Instead of simply setting a revenue goal, we are going to clearly map out what it will take to achieve revenue goals in every category of our business. In the past, we tended to measure overall revenue growth instead of growth in each of our product lines. This year, we want to make sure that we are growing revenue in the areas that we actually want to be growing in.
People: Something we’ve always wanted to do is create intentional learning and development plans for our team. This year, we are allocating budgets and creating plans for every member of our team to learn new skills connected to their roles and to learn from others in our industry who are doing amazing things. As a company that teaches others how to be better leaders, we want to make sure that we are focused on learning and growing ourselves, too.
Infrastructure: We want to be better at making informed decisions based on data, especially considering that we are a content company. This year, we will create a system to measure the impact of our work and find out what is resonating with our audience and what isn’t. We will use this data to help us create the type of content and experiences that you are looking for!
And that’s it! Those are our five focuses and initiatives for this year. We certainly didn’t land on this overnight. It took a lot of time and attention. Like, a lot a lot. Monique, our Chief of Growth, and I spent months meeting, thinking, and voice-messaging back and forth, but it was 100% worth it. It makes such a difference to have this strategy ready to go. Because we are going into this year with clarity, we have a compass for making decisions. We can look at things on our calendar and determine whether we have the capacity to do it this year, knowing what our focuses are. And now, looking back, I can’t believe we haven’t had this before . . . and yet, we’ve been able to get to where we are now. But hey, I guess that's the whole “permission to screw up” thing, right?! You don’t know what you don’t know. I’m so excited to take the work we’ve done on our strategy so far and build on it in the years to come.
Throughout the process of creating and executing this strategy, we have promised each other to keep it human. We don’t see this strategy as rigid or be all, end all. It’s the first time we’ve ever tried this, and we know we may not get it exactly right. So we are giving ourselves permission to adjust it as needed and keep it simple. We very well may change things, and that’s okay. We want to keep our company calm, and a calm company means calm growth. If we ever feel that our strategy makes us feel anything but calm, then we will ask ourselves if it’s really the direction we want to go.
I hope this inspires you to think about what you can do to provide more clarity in your own life, whether that’s creating a strategy for your team, your organization, or even using the principles here to create more clarity about the direction you are headed in your own life. What would a version of this look like for you?
Big hugs,
