You have an innovative and differentiated product that has withstood your relentless scrutiny and you are ready to go forth and conquer. (In other words, you’ve mastered what I call the “3 Cs of Entrepreneurship,” which you can read about here.) Now it’s time to talk about how to build your ideas into reality. I approach this process by working through five key steps. It’s critical to give all of them your equal attention and to understand how they influence one another.
Here are my “5 Steps to Strategic Execution”:
Vision: This is your dream—what you want to be and where you want your enterprise (whether social, business, or hybrid) to be in 20 years. Some may say your mission should come first, but I start with vision, because you need to know where you are headed to forge a road to get there.
While dreaming can be criticized as undermining an entrepreneur’s ability to stay grounded and focused, it is an extremely valuable pursuit, because it orients us toward where we are going. As Henry David Thoreau said, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Let’s talk about building those foundations…