Andy Liu is a serial entrepreneur, an angel investor and the writer of a blog called Inspired Startup. His writing is pretty brilliant, which is why I often recommend the blog to my peers. Today Andy wrote a post called The Power of Small Ball Strategy, which advocates using a variety of different growth tactics rather than trying to execute one big one. Go for many base hits rather than chasing the big home run. It's right on with what gets preached here at Scrappy Marketing.
Here is an excerpt of Andy's entry.
Let’s say that you run a donut shop. You want to double sales in 2009. The “big-inning” strategy would be to focus on one idea and throw all your resources behind it to see if you get the big win. Perhaps, you decide that the big-inning strategy is to sell wholesale to commercial customers. You bet it all, you hire salespeople, you ramp up production, you ramp up advertising, and you invest ahead of the curve. Many of you might think this is a good strategy, but especially in 2009 - this can be disastrous. You could kill your company.
Small ball strategy would dictate, let’s test with a small population and see if we can make it work with one corporate customer and then optimize for more - then step on the gas pedal. You don’t hire salespeople, you don’t ramp up production, you don’t ramp up advertising and you don’t invest ahead of the curve until you’ve proven the model on a small scale. You personally make the first sale, you personally make sure it’s profitable, and then you may find that customer starting to refer new clients and you grow organically. This may allow you to also pursue other small ball strategies such as testing out a pricing model, etc. The idea is to test small then push.
Click here to read the full entry.
This concept is right in line with my previous entries:
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