What if your business isn’t struggling because of bad strategy, but because you’re doing the right things in the wrong order?
What if your business isn’t struggling because of bad strategy, but because you’re doing the right things in the wrong order? In this season two premiere, Michelle is digging into why sequence over strategy matters even more than ever, especially in a market that’s tighter, noisier, and far less forgiving than it used to be. She shares what she’s been hearing from business owners, why now is the time to double down on what’s working, and the three big areas she’ll focus on this season to help you plug leaks, boost results, and create your own unfair advantage.
Resources
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Michelle Warner on Web | Networking That Pays | Free Workshop
Sequence Over Startegy Curated Playlists
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 plus years I've been doing this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. And on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Season Two
Welcome to the season two premiere of Sequence Over Strategy. We usually start these episodes with a question that I then go on to answer and help you dig into how to break that down into a sequence over strategy and asking the right questions. But this time in our season premiere, I want to start with a theme for the season and what's been on my mind this summer as I have thought about the journey we took in this podcast over the past year plus and what's going on in the market right now and what I'm hearing from everyone.
Because I've been sitting with how to bring you the best now that I've come back. Last year, that first season, it was all about building you a reference library of all the things that I want you to know, all the foundations that you asked me to expand on and I don't have time to do so, or that I just want you to know so that you can understand the foundations of how to build your own sequence over strategy centered business. But now I've shared those.
So what do you need now? I wasn't just going to do a podcast for a podcast sake, but it hit me as I was thinking about everything that's going on in the market and everything that I'm hearing from folks. This is called sequence over strategy for a reason.
Because why do I care about sequence over strategy? I care because when you're not doing things in the right order, you're sacrificing some results. You're sacrificing some revenue, some time, some energy, something is being given up when your model is not optimized in a sequence over strategy way.
The Market Has Changed
But here's the catch. Here's what's different now. I'm not going to lie to you.
Sometimes that doesn't matter. For example, in the early days of online business, when the market was wide open and everyone was buying everything, honestly, it didn't matter if you got a lot of the things that I talk about right now, didn't matter if you got them right or wrong. I mean, the idea was still academically correct.
The most optimized business is still one that follows sequence over strategy parameters, but the market was so wide open that you could get away with murder. You could still make as much money as you wanted while expending only the time and energy that you wanted to expend. There wasn't a big penalty for not having an optimized business.
But that's been changing. I mean, we talked about it quite a lot in the podcast last season. I would say since 2018, 2019, I have seen this change.
That's why sequence over strategy existed as something that I've started to talk about over the past five years. And so for most of us, those markets, you know, again, they've been definitely saturating. And what happens when markets saturate?
Well, literally what happens is there's more competition, sometimes less buyers. So you start to feel a pinch. Your margin and your profitability tends to go down.
And how do you combat that? Well, I'll tell you what most of us immediately think of in a non-sequence over strategy way. When you start to feel the pinch, when you start to see your profitability going down, you start to think about, should I increase or decrease prices?
Should I add a new product? Do I need to add a new customer segment? Do I need to do more marketing?
If you've been around here, you'll know that those are rarely the answer. I bring up those examples often. Because what you actually want to do is not immediately think, oh, I need to add something.
I need to do more. What you want to do instead is get better at what you're already doing. You want to plug the leaks.
You want to double down on what's working. And that's where we come to this season's theme, which is it matters more. Sequence over strategy matters more.
Because right now it matters more that you understand what an aligned business looks like and what it doesn't look like. So you understand what it looks like to go in order that you do things correctly. And because that's going to stop the leaks in your model.
And while we've been having saturation for about five years, that saturation, that noise in the market, it's just getting louder. There's a lot of uncertainty out there about what the economic world is going to look like. Different markets are really being impacted by different decisions that are being made at governmental levels.
And so leaks that didn't matter before when, again, the market was wide open, you know, you probably didn't even notice that they were there. Well, now you're noticing. And I know you're noticing because I'm hearing it more.
You're not reaching out to me anymore about, hey, what do I do to expand on this growth? The growth is going so quickly. How do I do a better job of nurturing it?
Instead you're reaching out to me and you're telling me that you're seeing less growth, that you're really interested in shoring up what's already there, that you found something that did work and you want to understand why, because you want to double down on it. Maybe your leads are ghosting and you want to understand why that's happening, or people are falling off in their journey and you want to understand more about how to prevent that from happening. And when I start getting that feedback again, that just tells me that we're in the stage of tightening markets.
Key Focus Areas for This Season
And I'm going to repeat it again, that everything matters more. You have to plug those leaks. You can't get away with murder anymore.
And so when I look at that, when I look at that feedback and when I distill that down to, hey, how can we really help this season? How can we think about the different challenges that you are seeing that you are facing right now? How can I look at everything you have been telling me and then distill that down into some categories so that we can start to understand as a group how we can think about mattering more?
Sounds great. Like, okay, you just need to do better. Well, that's not very helpful feedback, right?
When I say just do better, what does that mean? Let's get that into some categories so that we can start breaking down some component parts that go even deeper than we went last year. Last year, we talked about all the foundational stuff, right?
We talked about the business styles. We talked about relationship and traffic marketing. We talked about the big concepts.
Well, how can we get into some of the details when you have to double down on some of those concepts? So what are those? I've taken all the data, all the work that I've been doing with clients over the past six to nine months, everything you have been telling me when you reach out to me, whether that's in a LinkedIn DM or over an email, or if you come to an event and you're talking to me about what's happening, I've taken all that data and I've distilled it down into some categories again so we can organize this in our brain. Some of these are going to sound familiar and some of them are going to sound brand new, but here they are. Category one in terms of it mattering more is business model iteration.
You know, like I said, early on, I talked a lot about growth because that's what we were doing. And so we were looking at business model growth. How do we get this engine to do more because we have more opportunity, we're not capable of taking in all the opportunity that we can.
And that's still definitely a thing for some folks, but a lot of more folks are coming at me and they're thinking, how can I iterate my model, right? How can I make sure that I'm taking care of what already exists? So how can I prioritize all my ideas?
Before there was an idea of, I have all these ideas, how can I make them all happen? Now instead, it's how can we prioritize these? How can I do a better job productizing my stuff?
Again, topics we've always talked about, but we talked about it a little differently. Before productization was, how can I be more efficient? How can I get this to more people, right?
I have all these leads coming. Okay, that's certainly a viable conversation. But now the conversation is going around productization.
How can I be more efficient for myself? How can I, again, find the leaks in a customer experience? How can I make sure that I'm delivering this in a productized way that isn't so much about being mass market, but is more about the customer experience and making sure that everybody is getting the absolute best?
And with that, I cannot tell you how many conversations I'm starting to have about product line organization. This didn't necessarily used to be something that I would talk about with my clients. It didn't matter.
But now we're getting really granular about how do we think about the organization of our product line? And what does that mean for a customer journey? So we're going to be talking about, and this is a new concept, right?
I'm going to be introducing you to product line organization and how you can think about organizing your product line and describing your product line so that it can start building customer journeys for you, where people maybe take a journey through multiples of your products or understand how long they should be working with you, because we're really in a space where that retention of clients is a really valuable thing over trying to find new clients over and over again.
So we're going to talk about all those things, right? The productization of ideas, just productization of your things and product line organization and what to do basically with all the things that you've created. So that's to me what business model iteration means.
You have all these things you've created. How can we iterate on that, double down on it, right? Find what's working well and make it work even better.
That's going to be a big topic this season. Second one you've heard all the time, marketing alignment. We are going to continue to talk about relationship and traffic marketing and the nuances in there because again, it matters more.
Literally every single day I see it mattering more that you are properly aligned with the way that your business model should be marketed, right? So we're going to continue to talk about relationship and traffic marketing and get into the weeds of that a little bit more because every time that you are not marketing in alignment with how your business is set up, again, you're leaking leads for lack of a better term. And so we want you to be really careful so that you're not doing that and you're taking care of the people who do find you because in a world where maybe the pool of leads is smaller, you want to be in a position to not be wasting any of those, again, for lack of a better word, right?
Five years ago, you could have all the slippage that you wanted when you would still have enough leads and enough sales coming through. That's not as common, not as true today. And then finally, I'm going to be talking about a category of unfair advantages.
And this isn't necessarily something that I have called out specifically in the past. And what do I mean by unfair advantages? I mean, how can you build some tools for yourself that give you an unfair advantage over everyone else because nobody else knows this stuff exists or they're not aware of it or they're not doing the work to bring it to the surface?
And again, in a world where it matters more, where we're looking for the nuance, where we're looking for what can we double down on, having some unfair advantages in your toolbox is going to be, well, a real unfair advantage for you in the best possible way compared to everybody else who is out there. So what are some examples of unfair advantages? Well, one's going to sound really familiar, and that's having the best network possible and really thinking through who you're connected with, why you're connected with them and building that.
I believe fervently, and I only believe it more every single day, kind of like relationship and traffic marketing, I believe fervently that your business is going to be the average of the quality of your network. And so in a world where we're looking for unfair advantages, where we're looking to double down on things, it's important that you are paying attention to the quality of your network. And we're going to continue to talk about that.
We're also going to talk about resilience, which in my world, in a very practical world, means your ability to understand how to navigate changes in the markets and changes in the business. If you've heard me talk about the business styles, or you've heard me talk about how to think about different market shocks that hit your business, this is what I'm talking about, right? Resilience has a lot of different definitions, but in my world, resilience means how do you look at something that is happening to you, happening to your business, happening to the market at large, and how do you know how to respond to that?
So we don't want to respond to those things by either pretending they're not happening, or again, by throwing spaghetti against the wall. In a sequence over strategy world, we want to build resilience by A, being able to recognize when market forces are happening around us, and then B, knowing what our options are when those happen so that we can, as calmly as possible, work our way through that. And that's what I call navigation ability, right?
As you have navigation ability through market forces, you build resilience because you're ahead of the game. You're in a proactive stance. You're not waiting to see what happens.
So we're going to be talking about that resilience and that navigation ability. And then speaking of navigation and speaking of resilience, one of the best ways to recognize what is happening going around you is to know what the truth is. And that might sound really obvious, but it's nuanced and it's hard.
It is hard to understand what is actually happening around you. You have a ton of information coming at you. A lot of that information is delayed.
It's complicated. It's varied. And so we're going to talk about how to really understand what is the truth so that you can feel confident responding with your resilience and your navigation.
And then finally, we're going to talk a little bit more about a topic that I love to geek out on, and that's just understanding biases that are coming up for you that are going to be in your face and are going to try to get you off track. For example, confirmation biases or my favorite in this space, survivorship bias. You're going to hear a lot of stories from people who are telling you things worked, but they're telling you that through a survivorship bias lens.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that again so that you can understand the truth so that when people are telling you to try this or do that, you can discern for yourself, hey, is this something that is foundational, that is fundamental to most business models like mine, or is this something that's specific maybe to that person or their business and they had some sort of unfair advantage working for them that allowed them to have a success and now they are presenting that as if it is possible for everyone.
And I'm not even saying that as if they would be doing that in the negative way. They may not know that they are communicating through a survivorship bias, but I want you to know because when you don't know, you are prone to chase some ideas that aren't the most productive for you. And so we really want to think through what is survivorship bias?
How do you spot it? Same deal with confirmation bias, right? How can you spot those?
How do you learn?
How can you train yourself to spot those things so that you can understand what the truth is so that you can build that resiliency? A lot of our unfair advantages are all tied together in that way. So that's what we're going to be talking about this season and we're going to be getting you primed and in a place so that you can better respond, better double down, and just be a better business owner for the market conditions that you are faced with right now.
And with that, I'm just going to leave you and say, welcome back. I'm so excited to be here for season two of Sequence Over Strategy. I'm going to be back in two weeks so that we can start breaking down some of these very specific ideas.
I missed you this summer. I'm just so excited to be chatting with you about all of these concepts and bring you a whole new season that's going to allow you to go even deeper on the fundamentals that we covered last time. So if this episode helped you, if this podcast helps you, please, I would be so grateful if you shared it with someone else who it might help.
As you know, you can even go to my website, themichellewarner.com backslash podcast. And there you're going to find some curated playlists that I put together of season one shows that break down those fundamentals I just talked about in different categories. There's a whole playlist on relationship versus traffic marketing, whole nother playlist on kind of business design fundamentals.
There's even a playlist on connection. So if you're thinking about that networking, there's a playlist on that. And then finally, I put together a playlist of all of my best interviews that I've given elsewhere.
So check out those playlists at themichellewarner.com slash podcast. If you want to get up and running and just know that you're in a great place to start season two with me, or again, if this podcast has helped you and you want to share it with others, that's a great place to send them to get them started. And as always, reach out to me at themichellewarner.com.
Feel free to send me an email. I would love to hear what you're seeing in the market, what you're thinking about the market right now. How can I help you this coming season, both with the topics I just talked about, and if there's something else that you're seeing, let me know about that.
Because we can get in there, we can get into the nuance, talk about how you double down and take advantage of the things that are working right now in a market that may look a little bit different than the ones we have been accustomed to over the last several years. With that, I will see you back here in two weeks, and it is good to be back.