What Is Business Strategy? A Guide for Freelancers and Independent Consultants

You’ve heard it a million times—be strategic.

When you work by yourself, the concept of strategy might seem like a luxury reserved for larger companies. In reality, strategy is crucial for solo business owners because every decision counts, and resources are limited. 

But what exactly is strategy, and how can you “be strategic” as a solo business owner?

At its core, strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a goal. It involves making deliberate choices about how to allocate resources, which activities to prioritize, and how to navigate challenges to reach your objectives. Think of it as a series of guideposts—steering your decisions and helping you stay on course.

Why Strategy Matters for Solo Business Owners 

As a solo business owner, you wear many hats. You handle everything from marketing and sales to customer service and product development. With so many roles to juggle, it is easy to get caught up in working in your business instead of on it. A coherent vision with an aligned strategy helps you see the forest instead of the trees, staying focused on your longer-term plans instead of the day-to-day minutia. 

We’ve all been there…you sat down in December, created a bunch of incredible goals for your business in the coming year and then lo and behold, it’s September and you’ve been so busy reacting to client needs, doing all of the admin work in your business, and worrying about cashflow that not only have you not made progress on your goals, you forgot they were even there. 

A good strategy is a litmus test, helping you allocate your time, money, and energy more effectively. By prioritizing activities that align with your strategy, you avoid wasting resources on things that don’t contribute to your goals.

This litmus test will also help you stand out in a crowded market. When you know where you’re going and why, you can better identify your unique selling points and find ways to leverage them instead of just taking whatever comes your way.

Emergent Strategy: Navigating the Unpredictable

In the world of business strategy, there are two primary approaches: deliberate and emergent. While deliberate strategy involves meticulous planning and execution based on predefined goals, emergent strategy takes a different path. It’s more about adaptability and seizing opportunities as they arise. 

Emergent strategy refers to a flexible, adaptive approach to strategy that evolves in response to real-time experiences and changes in the market. Unlike deliberate strategy, which is based on long-term planning and structured objectives, emergent strategy is characterized by its ability to adapt and adjust based on unforeseen opportunities, challenges, and new information.

Here’s the big secret: there’s no such thing as deliberate strategy, especially for solo business owners. 

Most business strategists and self-help gurus promote the idea of big goals, strategic plans, and long-term thinking. The thing is, those plans and goals aren’t going to help you when things change, and you have to adjust quickly.

To survive (and, dare I say, thrive), you need a flexible, adaptive strategy to plan for the unplannable and make yourself antifragile.

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Instead of using antiquated goal-setting and strategic planning tactics, solo business owners have to utilize flexible, emergent strategies to learn by doing and then adjust as they go. 

What is Emergent Strategy?

Adaptable: Emergent strategy thrives on flexibility and responsiveness. Businesses that adopt this approach are open to changing their course based on new insights, market trends, or unexpected challenges.

Short-Cycle: Instead of making sweeping, long-term plans, emergent strategy involves making small, incremental adjustments based on ongoing learning and feedback.

Opportunistic: Emergent strategy often involves seizing opportunities as they arise, rather than sticking rigidly to a pre-determined plan.

How Do You Make a Strategy?

So, how do you develop a strategy for your solo business? Here’s a simplified approach to get you started:

1. First…Vision 

The key to an effective emergent strategy is a strong vision. You might not know exactly where you’re going or how you’ll get there, but you have to have a definition of the long-term effect you’re aiming to achieve. I call this the long game. 

The long game is the long-term effect you aim for, the miracle outcome you want to achieve. What effect do you want your work and life to have on the world? 

How to identify your long-game

• Does it feel like a miracle? 
• Is it the work of a lifetime or even multiple lifetimes? 
• Is it intrinsically connected to who you are and what you want? (See the following two steps for more.)

2. Know Your Baseline

Take a moment to clarify where you are now, who you are, and what you value. What are your strengths and weaknesses? This is your starting place around which everything should be organized, at least for now.

The question is simple, but the answer isn’t because most of us never spend the time to really think about it. Ask yourself, who am I? What is my work? 

Don’t get stuck here. The person you are today most likely won’t be who you are next year. You just have to know who you are to have a foundation from which to start.

3. Decide What You Want

Most people think they know what they want but don’t do the hard work of identifying their desires. This leads to meaningless “goals” that have nothing to do with what we want, which leads to lifetimes of following dreams that are not our own and doing things we don’t want to do. 

You can’t get what you want if you don’t know what it is.

OG hustler Napoleon Hill calls this Your Definite Chief Aim, one of the centerpieces of his philosophy around manifesting your desires.

“Wishing will not bring riches. But desiring riches with a state of mind that becomes an obsession, then planning definite ways and means to acquire riches, and backing those plans with persistence which does not recognize failure, will bring riches.”
- Napoleon Hill

While Your Definite Chief Aim does not have to be about riches in the literal sense, it does need to resonate in your core as something you cannot live without­—something you can’t not do.   

Most people do not have this kind of single-minded focus, this obsession. That’s not because people are inherently lazy or unmotivated; it’s because societal mindsets around desire condition us. 

4. Set Better Goals

Setting goals should be an exercise in defining success overall, not limiting yourself to that definition of success at a specific moment in the future.

Let’s face it, things change. In reality, that is the only thing you can be sure of. So why build goals with deadlines and numbers that don’t push you toward what is the best thing for you in this moment?

Instead, build meaningful goals that will help you now instead of forecasting the next best thing.

Here’s how to do that:

Quality instead of quantity

Often, we don’t know exactly what we want to strive for until we go through the act of defining success. Using qualitative goals allows you to have something to aim for while honoring that you’re not going to be the same person or business next month or next year. A qualitative goal defines success by what it looks and feels like, not by arbitrary numbers. 

Ambitious but ambiguous

Achievable is great, but seriously, aim for the stars. Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible at this moment because it is only a moment. Circumstances change constantly. Make that ambitious (qualitative) goal, map out a few ways to get there, and then explore until you find the right path. Chances are you’ll find other options along the way that you never even thought of that end up getting you where you want to go.

Relevant…now

Make sure your goals are relevant to who you are and where you are now. While keeping in mind that who you are today is not where you’ll be tomorrow. Relevancy is iterative. You should always have a north star and orient around it, but that north star might move in the sky over time. What’s relevant to you in your 20s will likely be irrelevant in your 40s. Your “why” will change as your life does.

Timelines, not deadlines

The truth is, most of us set SMART goals, whether for our work or life, and then put them on a shelf where we revisit them at New Year’s or our annual review, and a) feel guilty about our lack of progress, b) see that we’ve blown them out of the water, or c) find that they’re no longer relevant.

You don’t have to plan out the next five years of your life right now; get clear on what you think you want that to look like and what progress looks like at this moment. Reinforce your qualitative goals with quantitative timelines (AKA, actual dates). Do this in short cycles so that you have time to see progress and then adjust as things change because they will.

5. Align Goals with Strategies and Tactics 

The biggest mistake people make is confusing strategies and tactics with goals. 

“Post more on LinkedIn” is not a goal but a tactic. If you don’t know why you’re posting on LinkedIn and to what end, then the act of posting is pointless. 

There’s a lot of confusing advice out there about goals vs. strategies vs. tactics—let me give you a simple formula: 

• Goal: What do you want?
• Strategy: What will you do to get it?
• Tactic: How will you do it?

If you have difficulty defining the goal, start with the strategies and tactics and work backward. The important thing is that they all align; tactics should be nested under strategies, strategies should be nested under goals; it should ALL be nested under your vision. 

Now Do It

This a guide for crafting a strategy, not executing it—that’s another guide in and of itself. With that said the most important thing to do once you’ve created a strategy is to make a plan and then revisit it regularly. 

Goals and plans are only as good as the systems you’ve built to revisit them and adjust accordingly. The person making that plan today is not the same person who will be living that plan next week or next month. Create a system for checking in on your structures regularly. Get a new baseline and update that framework to always to reflect your circumstances and context.

Conclusion

For solo business owners, strategy isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a vital component of success. By defining your vision, setting your baseline, knowing what you want, and then building better goals to achieve it, you can navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship with greater confidence and purpose. Remember, a well-crafted adaptive strategy is your guide to turning your dreams into reality. 

Ready for better strategy and implementation in your business? Book a Free 30-minute Clarity Call with me.