A recent meeting with the Scaleup Network at the Danish Confederation of Danish Industry helped us renew our relationship with our own strategy.
As mentioned in a previous post, we’re currently part of a Scaleup Network by The Confederation of Danish Industri (DI).
Recently, we presented our strategic challenges during a session in the network. A presentation which made it clear to us just how much more strategic work we can do to focus our efforts and increase the activity in each of our three strategic tracks: Consultancy, royalty and funding.
When presenting our strategy, it occurred to us how we’ve been spending our resources wrong in order to generate revenue. In reality, we don’t have all the resources we need, if we are to succeed in our ambitions. This means that either our ambitions are too big – or we should find a way to focus our resources.
Getting outside assistance
During the strategy session, it became clear to us that we need to outsource some of our tasks if we want to achieve all of our goals. Outsourcing in the way where we ask experts in various fields for their guidance in order to actually allow ourselves to achieve more with fewer resources – instead of insisting on learning how to do everything in-house.
Fundraising is a great example: We could think bigger in terms of soft funding in a lot of our projects, and it would be great to get some assistance in both thinking that way and executing afterwards.
In fact, it’s all about making our vision more executable: If we can break our ambitions down into concrete steps it’s easier to make them happen – with or without external help.
Into the helicopter, while bootstrapped
Bootstrapping a company comes with its own set of challenges. Without investors forcing us to really work with our strategy, it can be tough to get the full overview. Executing daily gets in the way of strategizing long-term; you’re always chasing the next opportunity and it can be tough to say no to lucrative projects – even when you should because they don’t fit your strategy.
It’s not that we don’t have a strategy, we always had. Our vision is great and it’s a clear guiding light for the decisions we take. Oftentimes, it’s just in shorter iterations at a time; we need to be better at breaking it down into smaller milestones in order to obtain the goals for the year.
The first steps we take start next week: We do an outline of the strategy. We involve the rest of the team in this strategy. And then we turn it into an actionable plan.
It’s not revolutionizing in any way. But during the crunch, it is great to be reminded to take strategy seriously by the incredible group of people in the scaleup network.