When you think “high paid strategy expert”, my story is not what comes to mind.
- I have no qualifications
- I have no MBA
- I have no PHD
- I didn’t go to a fancy school
- I didn’t do a relevant degree
- I never worked for slick consulting firm
Technically I did work for two glamorous blue-chip corporations – EY and L’Oréal – but that’s not so impressive when you consider that both of them fired me within a year.
So it’s ironic that now those same firms (well, their direct competitors anyway) will now fly me around the world to talk to their teams on strategy. Something which – on paper – I know much less than them about.
How did this happen?
Well after the failure of my corporate career I went on to create the “strategy department” of a marketing agency, and then ventured out on my own to be a “strategy consultant”. All pretty normal stuff, except for one thing:
I was making it up as I went along.
Rather than learning about strategy properly – which I was too foolish / lazy to do – my process was rather different. I simply observed the great brands, the ones everyone speaks about, and asked “what patterns do they share?”.
I then took these patterns, codified them, and sold them to small brands who were prepared to take a punt on my made-up theories. I even did a pretty successful TEDx talk about them.
But then something happened.
Gradually, unavoidably, I started to learn about “real” strategy. It started when someone commented on my TED talk “oh cool, this is just like Blue Ocean Strategy”, and I was like what the hell is that?
(For those who don’t know, it’s one of THE classic books on business strategy, so the fact that I’d never even heard of it tells you a thing or two about me).
What I discovered was alarming. All of these “original ideas” I’d had, all of these “unique theories”, were actually just textbook business strategy that I’d reverse-engineered and stuck my own labels on.
Turns out there’s really only a couple of ways to create a high-leverage business – and surprise surprise I wasn’t the first to notice them!
At first I was pretty bummed out about this discovery, but then I realised something.
The fact that me, a so-called “strategy expert” hadn’t really come across these ideas before said something. It said that this stuff – perhaps the most powerful set of principles a founder can learn – was hidden. It may be common knowledge in the halls of Harvard and the boardroom of Shell, but out there in the real world, among the next generation of founders who could actually use it, it was a mystery.
How the hell had this happened?
Simple.
The people who own this knowledge are high-paid consultants, and academics. What do these two groups have in common? They are incentivised to complicate things. Consultants complicate because it means they get paid more. Academics complicate because it means they get published more. It’s not bad, it’s just natural forces at work.
But still the net result is that most of the world gets shut out of this stuff – and it’s accessible only to those with the deepest pockets.
And that’s what I want to fix.
You see my reverse-engineered “street strategy” may be pretty similar under-the-hood to the Harvard stuff – but it’s far more clear, direct, and practical.
- It’s what’s been proven to work for my clients, young scaling founders
- It’s what gets them to breakthroughs the quickest way, not the most expensive
- It’s what I put into my book, No Bullshit Strategy, that made it such a hit
And ironically it turns out that it’s what the big corporations prefer too, as they’ve started inviting me to teach their teams about strategy.
My mission with this is to get every founder to master strategy, so that every business counts.
And to do that, I need a solution that is more scalable than consultancy, and more practical than a book – and that’s what The Strategy Shortcut System is.
The intention is to give every founder like you the knowledge and tools you need to:
- Get clear on the unique value your business offers
- Execute on it powerfully
- Inspire your team and customers with it
…and create a hyper-focused brand that truly has no competitors.
We’re only a few weeks away now, and in next week’s newsletter I’ll be sharing how you guys – my core crew – can get it the earliest and cheapest way.
See you then.
