Hi!
I have not visited your inbox in a bit.
Thanks for reading Above Average Intelligence: Dave Wakeman’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribed
How have you been?
I’m going to try a little experiment and share quick updates based on things I see in the news.
I’m working on a larger writing project and putting together a few new things…so shorter allows me to share some ideas with you and not overwhelm myself.
If you dig this, share it.
Liquid Death’s exit from the UK market is a smart strategy lesson.
When I teach strategy, I lay out the process in 5 steps:
- What does success look like?
- Who is our target customer?
- Why are they buying from us?
- What resources do we need to achieve success?
- What actions are we going to take?
It is easy to make plans.
Everyone is excited by defining a bold new destination: SUCCESS!
A lot of times, we can easily figure out who our customer is.
(Not those of us that say “everyone”. That means no one.)
We can even figure out our unique selling proposition.
However, more strategies fail due to a lack of resources than I care to count.
Why?
A few reasons come up in my work:
- We don’t know what we need to hit our targets.
- We convince ourselves that we can achieve our goals quickly and cheaply than is realistic.
- We overestimate how quickly something will catch hold.
Following the Liquid Death story, they’ve done one of the hard things in strategy…they’ve recognized that they don’t have the resources to achieve “success” and made a new decision.
One built right into the idea of “What resources do we need to be successful?” and changed direction.
This matters because that’s the hardest thing to do.
Admit your mistake.
Make a new decision.
Take action.
Sunk costs are real.
Too often, we can’t write them off.
Too often, not walking away from sunk costs ends up sinking us totally.
My question for you: Are you stuck in a market, a project, a process that isn’t working for you?
Are you continuing to travel this path because the idea of change is too much to consider?
And, what are you going to do about it?
Hit reply and say hello!
Let me know what you are working on and thinking about.
Dave