3 Steps to a Winning Business Strategy in the AI Age

Last week’s Mind Map Guru workshop with Suleiman Shaibu emphasized why strategic planning is critical for SMBs (small & medium businesses), with half statistically failing within 5 years. As Suleiman said, “If you don’t plan, then you’re planning to fail.”

This inspired me to share my strategic planning system in today’s article.

Why is this important?

In When Will AI Take Your Job?, Tomas Pueyo notes:

“It’s easier than ever to create a business: The cost of coding is dropping, the cost of design, analytics, hosting, content generation, marketing, sales, customer service… Anybody can spin up a business and rake in millions. This is thanks to the immense productivity gains we’ve seen in technology in the last few decades.”

In short, entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever, and the entry barrier is lower than ever for ordinary people to become entrepreneurs.

However, if everyone has access to these tools, then the competitive edge will in be how you use them.

In other words, strategic planning will play an increasingly pivotal role.

As we have seen in the previous few Guru events, the nature of Strategy involves understanding oneself, the company and the terrain as well as trade-offs and making decisions - the latin root word of which is literally “to cut off”, for we can only take one path at a time.

Ironically, Strategy itself is extremely difficult to formulate in our noisy modernity that’s overabundant in choices, tools and opportunities. Focus, which is required to execute on Strategy, becomes a scarcer resource still.

This is especially relevant for an entrepreneur like me who runs a lean 4-person team across 5 businesses, which means we leverage technology extensively for content creation, meeting summaries, process automation and brainstorming. However, it requires careful strategic planning to deploy AI in the right places*.

So let me walk you through my three-step system on how I accomplish both Strategy creation and execution so you can adapt it for your own purposes:

Step 1 - Business Process Map: I create a mind map of key business processes, showing how each department interacts as an integrated system and how it generates value for our customers. I walk every employee through this map no matter if they’ve been with me for a while or just joined yesterday. It ensures accountability by showing how each department’s output is another department’s input, therefore if they don’t deliver on time, they’ll create bottlenecks that could compromise the entire system.

My “business ecosystem” consists of Video Content, Written Content, Community, Podcast, and Services (corporate consulting and high ticket coaching). Each are distinct but feed into each other like a flywheel or, in this analogy, a house with 5-6 rooms that can be renovated upon every quarter.

Step 2 - Quarterly Improvement Focus: I review my business process mind map on a quarterly basis and decide which component needs improvement – similar to choosing which room in a house needs renovation. As resources are finite for SMB’s, focusing on the highest ROI rooms is a life and death decision. I also approach business like a scientist, which means every strategy is simply a hypothesis that needs to be tested in the market. Therefore, focusing on too many variables at once will muddle the experiment.

For example, this quarter I'm concentrating on Content (both video and written) as it forms the top level lead generation engine of my business funnel. I dubbed this initiative “Content 2.0”.

This Quarterly Focus Map breaks down my Content engine into five distinct components, each with its own respective Purpose, Metrics, and Projects. This breakdown helps ensure purposeful project planning and management towards set goals while measuring results with appropriate KPIs.

Step 3 - Execution Trio (Project Blueprints, Kanban Boards, and Sprints): The final step brings us closer to execution by breaking down the Quarterly Focus Map into project “blueprint” mind maps, which then get translated into actionable Kanban boards accomplished through 2-week sprints (with retrospectives). This method ensures we are laser focused on making steady progress, while remaining flexible to changes, learning on the fly and efficiently utilizing resources

For example, Lead Magnet (a market tool to give users something valuable in exchange for their contact) is a sub-project under the Convert node, which I created a blueprint mind map in order to design the product, in this case a 5-part email course on mind mapping.

This map identifies the tasks needed to bring the course to market, which gets inputted as “cards” into my Content 2.0 Launch Kanban board - ready to be worked on during my Sprints.

This is how I turn Strategy into action into results. Throughout each step, I’m using the Why-What-How Framework to communicate with my team: when delegating tasks or managing projects, each team member needs to know why they’re doing something, what their output should be, and how they’ll achieve it.

This approach not only helps improve my business steadily over time, kaizen style, but also keeps everyone aligned on their roles in accomplishing shared objectives.

For those interested in learning more about this system or exchanging ideas related to it, join us for the upcoming Mind Map Nation workshop this Friday (10/6) where I will go way more in-depth into each step and answer any questions you may have.

With a focused strategy and the right system, your business can rise above the competition and thrive in chaotic markets. Without it, you risk joining the 50% that don’t make it. I’ll see you this Friday.

*In next week's post, I’ll share my Centaur vs Cyborg strategy when leveraging AI across my businesses.

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