Do you need to win today, or tomorrow?
Do you need to win today, or tomorrow?
You can build future potential, or maximize short term growth. But not both at once.
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In professional sports, there is a term called a “rebuilding year”. It’s when a team trades away their best players for future prospects, in hopes of collecting enough talent to be a contender in future years. It’s an admission that the talent they have is better used to invest in the future, rather than winning in the current season.
Why not do both? Why don’t teams recruit prospects while keeping their star players? There are limits, mostly money, to what they can do. A team has a budget just like any business, and having expensive star players might not make recruiting prospects possible. There is also the limit of time, teams can’t give prospects playing time to develop if the stars are taking up all of the starting positions.
Put simply: the value of the star players might be better used to build for the future.
This framework works in any kind of business, including yours. You can build for the future, investing in new products, new markets and new people. Or you can maximize your growth today with the product, markets and people you have. Doing both means you won’t do either of them very well.
Still, it feels like we can do both? Why can’t we build new products while selling the old ones? You can, but you can’t do both as well as you would like. You have limits as well, both time and money, and your team can only have a single #1 priority. Whichever one you choose, that is the one that will get done first and best.
Choosing between winning today and winning tomorrow is hard. Whatever you choose, you are admitting that you won’t be able to focus on the other. Strategic decisions that put you at a disadvantage are always the hardest decisions to make, as they should be. It’s important to think through your situation and be honest about which is more important.
You should focus on winning today if…
Your business is growing fast. Better to play the game you are winning than risk everything on a new game whose rules aren’t yet known.
You have a short window of opportunity. Many markets have these time-dependent openings for disruption, and if you have one you need to take it. Examples include big technology shifts, disruptions in distribution and collapses of big competitors.
You have a limited runway. If your company has less than 18 months of runway, you need to win right now. Tomorrow might not come if you don’t.
You should focus on winning tomorrow if…
Your business today isn’t growing fast enough, and doesn’t have any real possibility of changing its trajectory. Don’t keep playing a losing hand.
Something has fundamentally changed in your market. If your original strategy was based on a different set of assumptions, build a new strategy since it’s a new game.
Time is on your side. If you have the runway to wait, you can let companies with less runway burn out and win the market by survival.
These are just examples, there are a lot of factors that go into such an important decision. The most important part is that you have a very explicit conversation with your team and your board so that everyone is in agreement. Is this a rebuilding year, or a championship year? Are you focused on winning today or tomorrow?
Whatever you choose, put everything behind it.
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