Navigating Strategy and Tactics: Crafting a Roadmap for Success

Hello and welcome to the show. This is one of those out and about recordings so expect to hear some noise in the background today. I'd like us to look at hustle and strategy or hustle and tactics, you know, depending on how you'd like to think of it. You know funny thing is when I said hustle and strategy. I remember that old movie with this guy what's his name the light skinned dude from Was it groomsmen or something.

I think it was got a horse hustle and flow yeah about the wrap artist wanted to blow anyway and then that's just aside whatever. So today, hustle and strategy and overall what I want to consider, not just for this podcast episode but for the next three of our podcast episodes is to think, to try and figure out when we should have a structured approach towards strategy. You know, sitting down with your business partners, wifey husband, kids.

You know, if you're one of those people who is old enough to have children who are ready to take over the reins of the business. So when they sit down and have a structured chat with people and then so excuse me and then went to have a so excuse me OK sorry about that throat hasn't been the same since the since the sore throat. Anyway where was I? Oh yeah. So to try and consider when we should have a structured chat with the stakeholders in the business, come up with strategy or if we should whenever or or when we can just keep gunning it.

You know, just have an emergent strategy, keep doing the business, see feedback from the marketplace and then let that determine what our strategy is going to be. Now before we get into that topic, of course, usual terms, sorry, in the usual tradition over here on the podcast, we would have to define the terms, what strategy means, what hustle means, what tactic means. I'm going to use hustle and tactics interchangeably because hustle, you know, by its very nature is the day-to-day tactical sort of thing.

So strategy complex can be defined in many ways, but I'm going to have very simple functional definition here. So in broad terms, strategy is just basically the big overarching questions. Where do you want the business to be, you know, in this time frame, this year, next year, you know, so that sort of thing. So strategy, where do you want the business to be while while hustle and tactics, those are the small steps that you have to take to make those dreams a reality.

So all those small steps that you take on a day-to-day or on a weekly, that's what we call tactics or that's what we call hustle. So I hope that makes that makes a lot of sense. Now business and strategy, yes, we often talk about them in contradistinction, but The thing is they are closely related concepts and you need them in the organization, you need them in the business. Whether you are a one man show or a one woman show or whether you work in a business that are you know 10/15/20 hundred people, you still need both of them, strategy and then tactics.

So business strategies like I said involves making high level decisions about the company, about the business, where are you going to operate, how you going to compete, are you guys going to allocate resources. So you know this whole thing of, OK, we started 2024, I want the business to blow this year. Am I going to do a podcast or am I going to start setting 50K aside for Instagram advertising, you know, stuff like that.

All those are big strategic decisions about how to achieve growth for the business. So those are the kind of questions that you ask when it comes to strategy, you know what market should we enter or which market should we exit? Because there's some people who have made those sorts of choices like you know, one man for 20/23/2022, we've been trying to do this, we've been trying to run this, we've trying to run that. But man, this thing is not working 2024, I beg, let's exit and let's see where whether we can find promised land someplace else.

So those are strategic questions. How do you differentiate yourself from the from the competition? Those are also strategic questions from my primary constituency. You know, my professional background is in law and my first stint in business was as a wedding photographer. So it's the sort of thing that, you know, my constituents, my people are asking lawyers. You know, X 100 number of thousands of lawyers graduate every year.

How do we differentiate ourselves from the crowd? How do we stop standing looking like charge and bail? Same thing with photographers. Every idiot has a camera. Everybody can shoot. AI can now do photoshopping and editing and things like that. How do we stand out from the competition? You know, what kind of products or service do we need to offer you guys who haven't been listening for a while? You remember the conversations that I had with my one of my video guys, Shagun, about how they expanded their own services to include light and sound, not just wedding video, because the way he was looking at it,

differentiation video wise, how to achieve. And then he thought that the margins when it comes to other things in the event space were a lot higher. So you buy the lights, you buy the sounds. The only cost that you have to pay basically is you just pay boys to go and set up and then most of it is, is a profit on top. And then it's not like these things have to be maintained every single month or every single year that matter because they're quite study.

And so for for My Guy Shekon, that was part of their own strategic decision. So yes, we're still doing this wedding video thing, but we need something to to pad it. And so they invested in lights, they invested in sounds, sound capabilities and then what else. So all of these are strategic questions. Now when it comes to strategy, there's a time frame. Strategies are typically long term in nature. So like back to my guy Shekon,

You buy all this equipment, you buy the equipment in, let's say you buy December in 2022. You don't expect they're going to make all your profits, but you know in the first two or three months in 2023, it's going to take a while. So the decisions that you are considering are going to be long term in nature, so years, maybe even decades. You know, for people who are playing on real big scale like my, my in laws, OK, well not them per SE but I remember the last time we were travelling to to Villa.

I know there's lots of what are these things called palm? Is it palm, palm trees, palm fronds, you know you guys understand. Now palm wine, basically those massive trees and driving through the driver was giving us just about how it takes like, I think, 7 years for one to mature to start producing palm oil. But they're creating new kinds of strands at the time. They're creating new strands that should be able to grow in about three years or four years.

So they're just some of those businesses that there's some decisions you're making. Are we going to do this variety or that variety? And you're not going to know the right answer or see the returns, you know, next year. So like if you're in that palm oil kind of business and you're switching varieties and things like that, you'll make the investment now. But you know whether this thing is going to pop off or not, you know, in seven years, that's more or less a decade.

So yeah, so that's what strategy is more or less. And of course, you know, involves months and years for execution, maybe even a decade. So that's it. Tactics on the other hand, these are specific actions, you know the minutiae, the small stuff that you do, the plans, the maneuvers, the detailed steps that that you need to carry out what the broader strategic objective is. So like take for instance me and this podcast, So part of the strategy for my business,

greater visibility and also to increase the amount of inbound that I get. I figured build a podcast and then have LinkedIn as part of the promotion and content marketing strategy. So that's the idea. Been executing it now for well over three years since before COVID and we have over 770 episodes on the podcast Now. The thing is, it doesn't necessarily have to have been that way. I could have for, excuse me, I could have decided to go old school, print out 5000 Flyers and then hand them out at parking lots in Abuja and also to promote the business consultancy services.

So those are the kind of strategic decisions that I could have made 3-4 years ago. And OK, so like I said, the tactics would now be the day-to-day stuff. So recording the podcast everyday, like recording this now, this is tactical because it is required to support the overall vision. You know, for the podcast to succeed, the podcast has to be scheduled, has to be conceived, has to be recorded, it has to be edited. You know, that's for the people who want high production value.

I'm not bothering with editing. Then let's see what else. OK. Therefore, on the LinkedIn end, you have to write the promo posts. You know, those are the tactics that are involved. But then if I had gone the old school routes, printing the Flyers, actually showing up to the parking lot, deciding on which cars, I'm only going to put the Flyers on Mercedes Benzes. Or should I ignore taxi cabs? How many cars am I going to drop the flyer on today?

You know, those sorts of things. Those are the tactical decisions. So tactics, you know, day-to-day, week to week strategy, overarching overarching things. So let's see if we can flesh it out with a case study. Again, we're going to look at someone who wants to enter the aquaculture and fish production industry in Nigeria. Why am I doing that? I'm doing that just because it was my last case study. So for those of you who've been listening for the last maybe 1020 episodes, you should be able to relate because you know some of the background work that we have done when it came to specifically when it came to coming up with the sales strategy.

So now we're going beyond sales strategy. Remember the last case study that I did on this whole Fish thing was sales strategy in particular, but now we're talking about business strategy overall. OK, OK. So the kind of questions that we could be consider when it comes to business strategy overall, we could be looking at market positioning. Now that means how are you going to, gosh, how do you define positioning? OK. Positioning is how you present yourself to the market.

Let me put it that way, how you present yourself to the market relative to the other players in the market, the the competition. So I guess that's the best way I can explain positioning for now for those of you who are, you know, MBAs and business buffs, you know, don't be too angry that I didn't give a technically robust definition. I'm just trying to get the newbies to understand where we're heading with all this. So how you presenting yourself in contrast to other players in the market, so you want to enter this fish game, you could be thinking am I going to be a premium provider because you know there are people who provide fish in Gudu market or wuse market or all those markets.

You know that's not, that's not premium, that's more on the commodity end. So these are strategic questions. They can ask yourself, you know, am I going to go the commodity route and just flood the market with fresh fish? Am I going to go the premium route? OK, well, I don't know what premium fish would be for those of you who are fish lovers, you know, you run into me or you send me a message, you know, hit me up, let me know what is a premium fish was ordinary fish because I've seen some kinds of fish and I think, wow, this is real high class fish.

I don't like fish anyway, but it looks like this high class fish. And then my wife is like, no, that's that's the poor stuff. Like rich people wouldn't eat this kind of fish. So anyway, so you can also position yourself in different ways. You know, nowadays this whole ESG, what's it called? Sustainability and what is the E? Is it ESG? Anyway, you guys get the juice. There's this whole thing about sustainability, environmental considerations, ethical considerations.

So you can also position yourself like that. Like everybody else, they just fish anyhow, you know, they don't care. But we we are getting sustainably sourced fish or ethically cultured fish or whatever. You can also decide are we going to target urban consumers only? Are we going to be selling in Abuja Central Business district only or are we going to be a distributor to satellite towns in Abuja, you know, like Cairo,

Nanya, you know all those places, maybe even Quags. Then you can also ask yourself how you're going to differentiate yourself from other people in the market. One way that you can do that is to expand the variety of fish that you offer. So excuse me, you could think about adding tilapia, catfish, mackerel to differentiate yourself from the competitors. Because from talking to Samuel Samuel Paul and that episode where we talked about aquaculture, it was like most people in Nigeria seem to be focusing on catfish alone.

So yeah, catfish is moving the market. So I guess that is how you can differentiate yourself. So include tilapia and mackerel and all these other stuff. There are some people actually doing that kind of strategy because my wife is a fish person. She really loves fish. There's this particular vendor that she likes in wuse to and the guy just has the guy has some real interesting stuff. He has octopus, calamari, shrimps, they have pink shrimps.

Those are the shrimps. I know they look normal. Then he also has funny kind of shrimps that look great. And I mean, to me they look like they're dead and calcifying, you know, like getting rotten. I don't know why people buy them, but my wife likes it and she said I should stop bad mouthing her food. So yeah, there's this guy in Abuja who is selling all that fancy stuff. You want calamari, you want, you want to eat octopus, you want to eat squid, you want to eat, you know, blah blah, blah, blah.

You know, there's a guy like that in the market. So that's why we are differentiating yourself from the people that are just going to wuse market and just selling ice fish. Then there's a question of distribution channels. Where are you going to be? Where are you going to to sell? I'm going to be looking at retail outlets, going to have a shop like this squid guy that my wife likes to go and buy stuff from. Let's see, what are you going to do strictly online, you know,

Instagram, Have people hit you up on WhatsApp? I want to do like Jumia Conga. I don't know if you can buy fish on Jumia Conga, but you know if if you can, you can consider that the whole point, the whole point when it comes to distribution channels is you're looking at the considerations are things like do you want a wider customer base, are you looking at convenient access to production and things like that. Then you can also talk when it comes to strategy, you can also be thinking about business tactics like sourcing.

Where are you going to source? Are you going to look at local Nigerian fish farms maybe because you want things to be fresh as we're keeping it local or keeping it in Niger or maybe price advantages? Maybe you might be buying, maybe it's more cost effective to source in Nigeria rather than buying maybe a higher quality macro or whatever, for instance from Egypt or maybe from Benin Republic or whatever. So these are some of the considerations.

Other questions like store design, you can think about designing your own retail outlets with different displays and signage to appeal to certain kinds of people. You know, these are all merchandising decisions because it looks like in Niger, it looks like all these fish people, they just put well, first of all, the store is clean and that's cool. That's from following my wife around. You know, even in places like Kara Market, the place is clean and that's nice because I really hate that fish smell.

And then you just see flies everywhere. So the stores are nice, the stores are clean, but everybody has the basic formula, which is the place is clean and then it's fluorescent lighting and they just have deep freezer just stacked, just stacked everywhere. In fact, if you don't know what's up, man, you're just walking outside, you might think these people sell deep freezers because you just deep freezer everywhere. So you might think of designing things different, you know, like how Samsung and Apple, how they design their stores, they're supposed to be attractive.

I don't know anything about merchandising, but I know that there's a way these people design their stores like you're passing and like this looks nice, maybe I should just enter inside and see what's going on. So you might consider stuff like that if you're entering into the free space, so on and on. Lots of questions around customer engagements, online presence, all kinds of things, lots of questions, but don't over have 15 minutes.

So I just want to bring it to a close. So summary, The thing is business strategy is looking at you know what direction is this business heading in, what are the long term goals that we have and tactics are those small, small, small, you know every day, every week, every hour, all those decisions that you're you're taking to execute that overall overall objective. So yes, in a theoretical or academic sense, we usually pit both of them against each other,

strategy versus tactics, but both of them are essential for the success of the business just to drive overall performance and growth. Now the future question that I would like us to tackle, since we're close to 20 minutes, let me just bring it to a close here. I want to see how good sales and business development practice can inform your strategy because after all on this podcast over here, just in case this is your first time listening to the show, we don't just talk about business from a general perspective because my area of specialty is sales and business development, particularly personal selling, that's, you know, one-on-one communications where you are, you know, face to face, belly to belly, shoulder to shoulder, you're actually talking to someone.

So that is my area of speciality. So I'd like to talk about all these business challenges and things like that from that particular perspective. So in the next episode we'll start looking at how good sales and business development practice can inform your business strategy. So that's all for today basically. So remember to connect with me on WhatsApp. The number is O8O 64662140. Again, the number 08064662140. Country code is +234 for those of you who are hitting me up outside the shores of Nigeria.

Then connect with me on LinkedIn. The name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm the host of the show. You can confirm the spelling of my name and my e-mail address or any other details from the link. We are currently listening to this episode. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next recording.