Is Your Growth Strategy Set Up for Success? (Take Our Quiz to Find Out)

When a sales team isn’t hitting their numbers, one of the first questions we need to ask is: Are they set up for success? The same question applies to leadership teams when they’re struggling to execute a growth strategy:

Are they set up for success?

When growth strategies are unclear, unfocused, lack commitment across the team, or simply aren’t very doable, leadership teams are almost certain to lose traction. By contrast, strategies that work consistently are grounded in four fundamentals: clarity, focus, alignment, and "do-ability".

In this post, we’ll dig into those four fundamentals and, at the end, share a quick self-assessment so you can gauge how well your firm’s growth strategy is set up for success.

Four Growth Strategy Engagement Fundamentals

In our strategy work, we find these four fundamentals—clarity, focus, alignment, and doability—are the key for teams to understand, commit to, and act on growth strategy with confidence and drive. Indeed, when we help leadership teams to build growth strategies, we’re not done until all of these fundamental building blocks are in place.   

Let’s break this down one fundamental at a time. 

Clarity: Is Your Strategy Clear and Compelling?  

Strategic clarity is foundational. It answers the key question, Where are we going? When your strategy is clear, it’s free from ambiguity and easy to communicate. And when it’s compelling, it inspires, motivates, and earns buy-in across the organization. Both are crucial.  

Evaluate the clarity of your firm’s strategy through the lens of these four questions. Does your strategy:  

• clearly describe what success looks like?

• make enough sense that everyone “gets it”?

• resonate positively across stakeholders?

• generate passion and enthusiasm?

  
  

Focus: Is Your Growth Strategy Focused on the Right Things?  

Focus is about prioritization and intentionality—channeling attention, resources, and energy into what matters most. It pins down the essential question, Are we going in the right direction? With strategic focus, your team narrows their field of vision to the opportunities and challenges that most positively impact the firm’s success.  

Use questions like these to assess your firm’s strategic focus. Does your strategy:  

• leverage your company’s most important strengths?  

• prioritize the most promising growth opportunities?  

• tackle the challenges that most limit growth?   

• empower your team to know what needs to be done first, second, and third to be successful?

  
  

Alignment: Are Your Team and Growth Strategy Aligned?  

We believe in the power of alignment here at Shepherd Advisors. Alignment addresses the core question, Are we all on board with this? It happens as every part of the company moves in sync, just like members of a great rowing team. As strategic thinking and action align, friction lessens and speed increases.

To understand how well your strategy is aligned, consider the following. Does it:  

• operate in step with growing market opportunities and changing customer expectations? 

• leverage marketing, sales, operations, innovation, and other key functions to work together as one integrated system? 

• have buy-in up and down the organization—from investors to leadership, from management to teams in the field? 

• promote a consistent cadence to coordinate, communicate, and make decisions around what is most important for growth? 

  
  

Doability: How Well Can You Deploy Your Strategy? 

Any strategy can look good on paper. Real strategic success, however, is realized in the execution. Doability gets to the heart of the question, Can we get this done? By answering this, you can assess how well your strategy translates vision into action and evaluate your progress along the way.

Execution requires rigor, rhythm, and accountability. These questions can help you evaluate whether your execution plan is positioned for success. Does your strategy:  

• clearly spell out specific goals and the actions needed to accomplish them?  

• assign specific KPIs and timelines that are tracked and evaluated?  

• appoint owners and allocate resources for each action that’s necessary for success?  

• set up execution teams to meet regularly in order to review, refine, and ensure your strategy stays on track? 

Is Your Growth Strategy Set Up for Success? 

No matter the industry or stage of growth, a successful strategy shares four essentials: it’s clear, focused, aligned, and doable. Miss one, team execution may falter. Miss two or more—and strategy success may very well be in jeopardy.

The questions in this post are a starting point—designed to help you self-assess your strategic clarity, focus, alignment, and doability. If you want to dive deeper, we offer a more detailed, complimentary assessment that provides a clearer picture of where your strategy stands on these four fundamentals.

Take our 5-minute Strategy Fundamentals Quiz, and you’ll receive a personal response from our team at Shepherd Advisors with more detailed insights you can use to strengthen your firm’s strategic set-up for success.