You Can’t Try Everything
Most strategic decisions require thinking, not doing.
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Making big decisions is risky. If you make the wrong choice, it could cost time, money and potentially the entire business. Beyond the business, bad decisions can hold back your career or even cost you your job, making the decision very personal.
So, a common solution is not to choose.
I have lost track of the number of leaders that, when faced with a big decision, avoid the decision by trying to do everything. Should we sell to SMB or enterprises? Let’s sell to everyone! Should we build product A or product B? Build all the things!
You can almost see the rationale. Given a few options and no clearly obvious winner, try to do everything until it’s clear what is working and what is not. Then, prune the losers, keep the winner and the decision is made for you. It almost makes sense.
There are a lot of reasons this is a bad idea, not the least of which is that it’s the most expensive way to make decisions. It feels safer because you aren’t betting everything on a single strategy, but what you’re really doing is spending time, money and people on running multiple businesses. That’s time, money and people you likely don’t have.
Even worse, the attempt to do everything ensures that you won’t do well on any of them. By diluting your focus you’re not going to be at your best, and something that might otherwise have worked will end up failing. Then you not only lack a solution, you lack any real options.
For example, selling to SMBs and enterprises are very different. The sales process you use, the way you reach the buyer and even the pricing are not the same. But it’s easy to trick yourself into believing they are both “sales” and avoiding a choice by doing both.
There are large businesses that can do both, and if you’re a large business then maybe you can too. But, at that point it’s not a major strategic choice as much as an exploration of a new opportunity. It’s only a major decision if you can’t.
Instead of avoiding the decision by choosing to do everything, you need to think. Model the decision and its options to understand which has the highest likelihood of success. Such as:
Top-down Modeling. Work backwards from your long-term goal to see what would need to happen with each option to hit it.
Bottoms-up Modeling. Work forwards from today and see where these options are likely to take you if you start on them now.
After doing modeling exercises for each option, you likely have some questions. Good! Answer those questions and use them to make the right decision. It’s a lot easier to find some answers than trying to build a few different businesses at the same time.
As leaders, our job is to make decisions. Avoiding them is a decision, but not one that I recommend.
For more on Decision Making, see:
Great framing on teh dilution trap. The SMB vs enterprise example nails it because people underestimate how fundamentally different those motions are, from deal velocity to implementation complexity. I've seen teams waste 18 months running parallel strategies only to realize neither got the focus needed to actually work. The modeling approach makes sense but requires real discipline to kill options based on thought alone.