Which Customer Are You Built to Serve?
By Aldridge Dagos, operations software engineer
Your strategy should explain why a customer would choose you before it explains what your team will do next quarter.
Hiring another salesperson might help. A new website might help too, though the team could finish both projects while leaving the customer’s decision exactly where it was. The projects need a reason to work together.
Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy Bad Strategy, published in 2011, starts from a tougher standard. Its publisher describes good strategy as a coherent response to an obstacle and distinguishes that response from slogans or financial goals. Wanting a larger business does not explain what prevents it from becoming one.
That is a useful place to begin if the current plan mostly says more. More customers, more offers, more activity. A revenue target tells you how large you want the result to be. It leaves open why anybody should buy the work that produces it.
Consider a hypothetical print shop. The owner could pursue recurring menu work for local restaurants. They could also pursue bespoke wedding invitations. Both customers buy printed paper. They may need very different businesses behind it. Choosing between them gets interesting when the choice reaches the press operator’s Tuesday.
A real choice has a respectable alternative
For this example, suppose restaurant owners tell the shop that menu changes create too much administrative work. They want a familiar file they can update, a dependable ordering cutoff, and a delivery they can plan around. That is the proposed opportunity, still to be tested with actual orders.
The print shop decides to become especially good at that recurring job. It keeps approved templates for each restaurant and agrees on the point after which a change moves to the next run. It offers a limited range of stocks that customers can inspect before ordering. The promise is straightforward: changing your menu should not require becoming a print-production manager.
Now a couple asks for invitations with a custom shape, an unfamiliar stock, and several rounds of design exploration. The work could be profitable. It could also make the shop better known. Saying no has a real cost, which is why the decision tells you more than a statement about putting customers first.
Another shop could sensibly choose those invitations. It might charge for design time, build a collection of unusual materials, and organize its schedule around patient consultation. Its customers could value that attention enough to support the higher cost. This is a different answer to a different buying decision.
Neither choice needs to insult the other. The restaurant shop does not need to call custom work wasteful, and the invitation specialist does not need to call repeated templates boring. Both can create good businesses if the customers exist and the economics work.
The danger comes from combining their promises without paying for the combination. A shop that offers unrestricted design exploration while pricing and scheduling every job like a repeated menu has left its staff to settle an argument management declined to have.
Roger Martin makes the connection explicit in his author-hosted interview about strategy. Choices have to reinforce one another. A collection of reasonable projects does not automatically create a reason for customers to prefer the company carrying them out.
Make the rest of the business agree
The restaurant decision should change something you can point to. Purchasing keeps the agreed stocks available. Sales describes the ordering cutoff before taking payment. The designer preserves approved files so a small revision does not require reconstructing the last order. Production groups work in a way that supports the delivery promise.
Those decisions earn their value together. Familiar files cannot protect delivery when sales accepts changes after the press run starts. Available paper does little when nobody knows which version the customer approved. A promise becomes believable when the people making it have arranged the work that follows.
Illustrative strategy map 01
One customer promise connects the choices around it.
Recurring menu changes with less administrative work.
Approved templates and a clear ordering cutoff.
Keep the evening moving.
Known stock, retrievable files and trained backup.
Revenue must cover preparation and reliable delivery.
The owner now has a basis for spending. A better system for retrieving approved files may matter more than a machine that produces a finish the chosen customers rarely request. Training a second person to prepare recurring orders may matter more than hiring someone whose strongest skill serves the invitation business the shop declined.
This is different from simply cutting things. Unused features create continuing costs, but a small offer is not automatically a strong strategy. The shop could remove half its services and still have no compelling reason for anybody to choose the half that remains. The remaining work must add up to a promise somebody wants.
The money must agree too. Roger Martin’s March 2021 essay on the business model in Playing to Win ties the revenue and cost model to customer and advantage choices. He also includes the cost of maintaining the capabilities those choices require. A spreadsheet should carry the cost of the promised service.
In our shop, repeat orders might reduce the preparation needed for each run. That is a hypothesis, not permission to ignore the time spent storing files and checking revisions. If those activities take substantial work, the price has to cover them. A service can be attractive to customers and still be a poor business for its owner.
A credible quote shows what supports its price. Strategy goes further by asking whether the company can keep producing that kind of quote and delivering that kind of result. The first order should not depend on a private arrangement that the second order cannot afford.
Let the people doing the work test the choice
I want a strategy to help somebody answer an awkward request while the owner is unavailable. If every unusual order still needs a founder’s private judgment, the stated choice has not reached the counter. The team deserves more than a sentence painted above the difficult decisions.
Suppose a restaurant asks for a late change. A useful strategy does not require the receptionist to recite that the business values dependable service. It gives them an answer consistent with that promise. The change can join the next agreed run, or the customer can choose a separately available service with a clear price and date.
The customer gets options they can act on. The worker can explain those options without inventing a policy under pressure. The owner protects the delivery commitments that made the restaurant offer worth buying. One decision serves all three because it settles the actual conflict in front of them.
Workers should also be able to challenge a choice with evidence. The designer may discover that the supposed small menu edits usually involve rebuilding badly prepared files. The press operator may find that the limited stock range excludes what returning customers repeatedly need. These are facts about the proposed business, not complaints to be filed beneath the strategy.
There is a familiar lesson in watching the work behind a feature request. The person closest to the difficult moment can show you something the original description missed. A market choice deserves the same contact with reality. Leadership chooses the direction, but the work reveals what following it requires.
Training should reflect that responsibility. Teach staff what the shop promises and why, then give them enough product knowledge to recognize a request that does not fit. A worker who understands the customer result can suggest a sensible alternative. Someone who only memorized a refusal has to send every complication upstairs.
Keep the rewards consistent. If sales earns praise for every accepted order while production receives blame for every missed deadline, the company has made two opposing choices. The strategy document cannot referee that argument. Management has to change what it approves and rewards.
This is where employees gain something more useful than a clearer presentation. They get a job whose expectations can coexist. Customers benefit because the answer at the counter matches the promise the workshop can actually keep.
A choice deserves a way to be wrong
Focus can become stubbornness. An owner can refuse good work because it falls outside a story they have become proud of telling. A choice needs evidence behind it and a condition under which the business would reconsider it.
Our print shop should learn whether restaurants actually reorder, whether customers use the agreed process, and whether the service earns enough after all the preparation it requires. A promising first conversation cannot settle those questions. The owner needs completed paid work and a view of what it cost to deliver.
The choice may fail in different ways. Perhaps the customer need exists, but the shop cannot deliver it at a workable price. Perhaps the production method works, but too few nearby restaurants care enough to switch. Those findings call for different responses. Lumping both under poor sales hides what the business needs to learn.
Testing can stay modest. The shop could serve a small group before buying equipment dedicated to the offer. It could make the ordering agreement explicit and see where customers depart from it. The point is to expose the assumption that could break the business, while the owner still has room to change the design.
Cash adds a real complication. A young shop may need to accept the invitation job to pay the bills while the restaurant business develops. That can be a reasonable temporary decision. Call it one, price the extra work, and give it a schedule that does not quietly spend the time already promised to recurring customers.
An exception becomes a strategic change when the business starts arranging itself around it. If custom invitations repeatedly earn more, attract returning referrals, and suit the team’s skills, the owner may have found a stronger direction. The original choice has done useful work by making the alternative visible enough to compare.
Changing direction then deserves the same care as choosing it. Existing customers need a workable transition. Staff need to know what their role becomes. A new headline cannot carry those obligations on its own.
The next time an attractive order arrives, the question is larger than whether you can produce it. Ask what accepting a steady stream of orders like it would require your business to become. Then decide whether you want to build that business.
Frequently asked questions
Does a small company need a written strategy?
A short written account helps when several people make commitments on the company’s behalf. Describe the customer, the reason they would choose you, and the operating choices that support the promise. Use enough detail to settle real decisions.
Can a business serve more than one customer group?
Yes, when the offers can coexist or the business can support their different needs separately. Examine the work each group requires. Sharing a product category does not mean sharing the same service promise or cost.
How often should strategy change?
Revisit it when evidence challenges an important assumption or the conditions around the business change. Frequent revision without new evidence prevents a choice from being tested. Keeping a disproved choice for the sake of consistency creates a different problem.
Is a revenue target still useful?
Yes. It helps define the result the owner needs and test whether a proposed business is large enough to support it. The strategy explains why customers might produce that revenue and what the company must do to earn it.