How to think about digital strategy

I speak to a lot of organisations now who are increasingly worried about their digital strategy. “I’ve been told we need to have one” or “I’m not sure what it is but we need to get it right” are some of the most common refrains.

Well the good news is you don’t need a bespoke digital strategy. The days when digital was a separate box which you could ignore or throw some specialists at are long gone. The bad news is that your strategy has to absolutely be digital.

What do I mean by that? The business, charitable, public or any other landscape has now become thoroughly digitised. The internet and the services it supports now permeate every aspect of our lives from communications (twitter, facebook, email), to operations (online stores, forms, invoicing, payments) and decision making (analytics, big data, transparency initiatives). 

More to the point, we and our children have become digital natives, used to the convenience and reach our devices give us. In this context having a strategy that does not take into account digital is a bit like a ship’s captain navigating without reference to the sea.

So how can we make our strategies more digital? Or, more exactly, how we can let the realities, capabilities and restrictions of our digital environment inform our strategy? Much ink, electronic and otherwise, has been spilled on this topic but I would recommend three steps as a good start:

1. Understand the legacy
2. Remove the box
3. Recognise how digital works

Understand the legacy

One of the biggest issues for many organisations is historically they have treated digital as a distinct area away from their core business. So you may have a company that is organised around offline services such as accounting or training. In this case the digital team, if there is one, tends to occupy a separate division from operations or say marketing. They look after the server, make sure the email works or update the website.

The problem arises when the majority of your customers decide they want to interact with you digitally i.e. online. This gives new online focused organisations such as Xero (accounting) or Codeacademy (training) a fantastic opportunity to take those customers away from you. They have digital capabilities embedded in every part of their organisation and are able to interact fluidly with the customer to maximum benefit. Whereas, your marketing people are suddenly trying to call up your IT department to co-ordinate social media and refresh the website using procurement procedures designed for buying desks.

Remove the box

Once you understand the problem, one of your first steps should be to remove the conceptual barriers that confine you thinking. Instead of a distinct area, you should think about how digital can inform every aspect of your business from promotions and operations to fundraising and stakeholder management. For each area you should ask:

1. What do my current practices look like in a digital context? 
2. How could I use digital tools to improve our performance?
3. What limitations or threats does digital represent?

Examples can include automating certain customer interactions, deciding to alter customer records in case they infringe data protection law or accepting online communications for secure transactions.

Recognise how digital works

OK so you have understood the problem and identified how digital can improve things. The next step is to implement a plan of action. There are two mistakes people make at this point and both can be explained by the common and wrong analogy of the building. The assumptions here are that like a building you can: 

a) specify your requirements and then commission a final product that will satisfy your objectives,

b) once the builders have left you will have little need for their skills beyond maintenance.

A much better way to think about it is you are commissioning a ship for your organisation to sail uncharted waters. Your people have always operated on dry land so they are not sure if their processes will translate exactly to the sea environment, the seas themselves are unpredictable and may require your ship to undergo serious changes so having an engineer on board seems like a basic precaution.

What does this mean in practice? The plus side is that unlike their building based counterparts digital products are uniquely flexible and accessible for existing professionals. First, stop thinking of procurement and development as separate processes and adopt a process that is suited to digital. The Government Digital Service provides a fantastic guide on how to do this and you can rest easy in the knowledge that it has been tried successfully on a whole country. Second, hire a chief engineer or have one of your senior team develop those skills. There are many free, professional grade courses available on the web and these can be picked up by anyone willing to invest the time and effort into doing so.

So if you want to assuage your digital concerns I recommend you understand the legacy, remove those boxes and recognise what it takes. A word of caution though, no process in the world can work without your team being behind it. Digital like anything else takes time, effort and skill. The traditional skills of listening and communication are just as important as they always have been and you must make sure your team can see the benefits for both your organisation and them in making the transition. If you do all the above you are well on your way to making your strategy 21st Century compliant.

An entrepreneur's approach to risk

As an entrepreneur one of the hardest truths to grasp is that most new endeavours fail. Worse still, of the tiny minority that succeed, luck is often the deciding factor.

This is not to say that talent and hard work do not play a part. They do, and are in fact the minimum bar for entry. But if you think that just by giving your all and being smarter than others will guarantee success you are fooling yourself.

So how do you acknowledge this truth without being paralysed by fear of failure? As F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

In this case the ideas are that you have all it takes to succeed and you probably won't. The key to making this work is to imagine both success and failure, think each scenario through with equal rigour and plan so that whichever outcome occurs you can progress in good order.

As CEO you have to be 100 per cent behind your strategy, providing the motivating force for you, your team and everyone who deals with your company. You also have to be fully prepared for everything to go wrong and able to pick up the pieces as you go.

Three things every successful entrepreneur needs to get right

When I left my job at City Hall to start a new enterprise I had no idea of what I should be focused on. Unlike many entrepreneurs I did not know others who had started their own business, nor had anyone in my immediate family done the same.

Don’t get me wrong, there were and are a huge number of books, blogs and other sources that talk about marketing, investment, product development and so on. The problem was it is a bit like someone telling you to construct a plane and describing all the elements but forgetting to mention what it would be like to actually build the thing.

Couple that with the fact that managing an enterprise as it grows is a bit like building that plane in mid-air and you have a recipe for disaster. An in-depth understanding customer acquisition cost modelling is of little use while you are struggling to re-attach the wings.

This post and the others that follow are written in the spirit of something I wish I had read back when I started. To kick things off I have introduced the three areas that you must always get right. Each of them could merit a book, let alone a post, in their own right but for now let‘s cover the basics…

People

Whether you are providing a service or a product, people are your organisation. Every successful enterprise needs talented, driven people with skills that cover the full range of activities — from product engineering to finance and marketing.

Now most of us will have some but not all of these people in our circles. That’s ok but only as long as you are prepared to go out and fill that gap. For social entrepreneurs one of the most common gaps is technology. In an age where digital is absolutely essential for scalable operation this can severely hamper an otherwise successful enterprise. When we began Stickyboard we had a fantastic digital agency to build our first products. The problem was this allowed us to put hiring a dedicated developer on the back burner, a decision that was to cost us valuable time and money down the line.

Plan

This is not about business plans! After five years and umpteen versions I, like many other entrepreneurs, have developed a pathological hatred for these dreaded documents. No, this is about Planning, specifically defining:

• what your end goals are
• what stages you need to reach them and how you know when you are ready to progress from one to another
• what your alternative plans are if you fail

Write these down on a piece of paper, draw them, whatever you feel like, just make sure you think them through. Before you move on try to evidence your thinking. For example if you have decided to use Visitor Traffic or Monthly Recurring Revenue as a criteria for success then look at similar enterprises and see what they were doing at this stage. Don’t just shoehorn references either. This is your enterprise, you are basing yours and your team’s success on these plans so make sure you are confident in the numbers before building a future on them.

Lastly make sure you think through your success and failure scenarios. We have a strange myopia where despite knowing that most enterprises fail to meet their original goals, we spend most of our energy thinking through the minority of cases where everything goes right.

Resources

The usual adage of things taking twice as long and costing twice as much is true. However this is more about challenging yourself as to what your enterprise needs to succeed and how are you realistically going to get that money. If you have done your planning correctly you should have a pretty good ball-park figure (and it will only ever be that precise). This will be based on your own experience and projections supported by independent references for your enterprise type and stage.

You should also know who might be able to provide those funds and have a realistic plan for pitching, negotiating and closing such deals (this incidentally applies to all types on finance — bank, VC, crowdfund, grant etc). One of the biggest lessons we learnt with Stickyboard was that the finance market was as, if not more, important than our customer market. Finance rounds take a long time, particularly once you have gone beyond seed stage, so this is not something you can address as you go.

Landing

When I look back on our experience (and stripping out the role fortune always plays) I can trace everything that went right and everything that went wrong to how well we managed these areas. No matter how pressured things become, focus on the above and you’ll make it through.

Two questions every entrepreneur should answer (and one they shouldn't)

Let’s start with the negative. At some point you will be asked:

What makes you an entrepreneur?

This is a valid but ultimately unhelpful question. Enterprise and entrepreneurship are fluid concepts where exact boundaries are defined only by their absence. More useful is the state of mind behind such a question, one that gets at two of the most important questions any social entrepreneur can ask themselves :

Why I am doing this?

What I am willing to do to make this happen?

(Here’s a hint. If your answers are “Yes” and “Anything” then you are not thinking hard enough.)

The “Why” is important because at some point you will need to remind others and yourself why you are doing this. It is a sad fact that most enterprises fail and even the successful ones fail most of the time before they succeed. This is even more so the case for social entrepreneurs where your most important markets — customer and financial — are still in early stages of development.

The answer to this question will also help you motivate others. I once met a women whose answer was that her newborn baby almost died for lack of specialist care when the country’s top experts were located down the street. She never wanted another person to go through that experience and had devoted over ten years to changing how we find care. To this day her answer motivates me in what I do and I know it was crucial in helping her inspire others — supporters, staff and partners — in what she did.

Answering the second question “What am I willing to do…?” will make the difference between you succeeding in what you want and only getting halfway. In our early days we went from our comfortable offices with guaranteed salaries every month to cold calling and handing out leaflets, when failure meant missing a pay check. As we grew the type and scale of promotion we did changed but one thing didn't — the need to bring in regular, increasing revenue and the relentless focus required to make that happen.

As a social entrepreneur the chances are you may be more motivated by delivering the service or product you offer, perhaps you like to focus on strategy and the bigger picture. You may even be one of the rarer type who are sales motivated. Whatever your interests the difference between success and failure is in realising where your boundaries are and being willing to bring others on to fulfil those roles when needed.