When a company tells me it has a strategy problem, my first suspicion is usually more practical: it has a resource and focus problem.
Strategy begins with three questions. Where are we? Where are we trying to go? What must we do to get there?
That sounds elementary. It is not. Companies regularly confuse a destination with a strategy. “We need to hit the P&L” is a target. It tells you the expected result, but not the choices required to produce it. “We want to conquer Spain” or “We want to expand across Europe” is closer to a strategic question because it forces decisions about markets, sequencing, capabilities, capital and risk.
But even when the destination is clear, companies still get stuck. They may have several plausible paths without knowing which one to follow. They may know the path but fail to translate it into steps. Or they may have the plan and still spread money, people and management attention across too many things.
That is why another strategy review is often not the answer.
A new country is a new business
One of my earliest lessons came while building Creamfinance in Spain.
The group was already operating across several countries. From a distance, opening another market could look like an exercise in repeating a successful playbook in a new location. It was not.
A new country is not the same business with a different flag. It is a new business carrying some inherited infrastructure.
Spain required us to rethink risk management, collections, customer communication and company culture. The customers were different, so the voice and message had to change. The collections methods also had to reflect how Spanish customers behaved. Internally, we set our own standards for how people were treated and managed.
The group gave me room to experiment because I had been clear about how I operated when they hired me. I was willing to challenge assumptions and try different approaches. That freedom came with a simple condition: the experiments had to produce results.
I passed the same operating contract to my team.
At times, people wanted to try things I believed would fail. When the downside was controlled, I let them. The purpose was not to celebrate failure. It was to allow people to build judgment, feel genuine ownership and learn how to fail quickly without becoming trapped by the failure.
But experimentation was never indiscriminate.
Collections was the backbone of the company. I would not allow uncontrolled experiments there. We introduced significant changes, but they were measured closely and supported directly. In areas where mistakes were more reversible—customer acquisition, marketing, talent management or ways of working—the team had more freedom.
Empowerment without financial intelligence is not leadership. It is negligence. The job is to know which failures the company can afford and which ones can damage the engine.
Activity is not accountability
The failure I have seen hurt companies most is a lack of real accountability.
An enormous number of people can be doing things without understanding what those efforts are supposed to produce. They complete tasks, attend meetings and report activity, but cannot explain the effect their work should have on the company.
If people do not understand what a good result looks like—and why that result matters—the company has very little chance of evolving successfully.
Management distance makes this worse. Headquarters can be far removed from the reality of a particular country, customer or operation. Teams receive targets without understanding their purpose. Functions optimize their own work while the overall business loses momentum.
The usual corporate response is more reporting: more KPIs, more dashboards and more data.
That does not necessarily create accountability.
The word key in key performance indicator should be taken literally. A company’s heartbeat is usually visible through a small number of indicators. The operating team should be able to identify them and connect its work directly to them.
You do not need to measure every movement inside the company. You do not need infinite dashboards. And you certainly do not need to drown the organization in data. You need to understand what matters and put the rest of the information into perspective.
In lending, one of the most important indicators I discovered was time to money: how long it took from the moment a customer entered the website until the money reached them.
It might look like a simple operational metric. It was not. Time to money expressed something fundamental about the value we provided to the customer. It influenced conversion and, ultimately, lifetime value.
That is where useful KPIs begin—not with the data that happens to be available, but with an understanding of what the customer values.
Trace the value before rewriting the strategy
When I enter a business, the first thing I try to understand is: what is important here?
What value is the business actually providing? Once that is clear, I break down the components that create that value. Then I ask who owns each component.
The sequence is straightforward:
- Define the value the company provides.
- Identify the drivers that create or destroy it.
- Give each critical driver a clear owner.
- Allocate money, people and management attention accordingly.
Most organizations do not break themselves down this way. They are structured around functions, history, reporting lines and accumulated bureaucracy. Finance, technology, operations and people become separate territories. Remote teams and global structures add dependencies. Every layer can slow the connection between a customer need and the person capable of acting on it.
It seems simple to say, “Find the value and assign ownership.” It is much harder to implement because companies carry organizational weight.
Strategy is capital allocation
Once you understand what creates value and who owns it, strategy becomes a financial decision.
Where should we put the next euro and the next hour of senior attention? Customer acquisition? A new market segment? Product development? Operations? Which investment can generate more value, and what evidence supports that belief?
There is also a less glamorous side to the equation: extracting the full output from the resources the company already has before automatically adding more.
I have worked in lending businesses where achieving net profitability was an immediate constraint. I have also worked in well-funded environments where cash was not the daily concern. The absence of a cash constraint changes behaviour. It can make an organization less sensitive to the cost of additional people, processes and projects.
Yet abundant cash does not make efficiency irrelevant. It can simply hide inefficiency for longer.
At The Workshop, I saw that once an opportunity was translated into financial terms—better service, a better process, meaningful savings or growth without a large incremental investment—it became much easier for management to support the initiative. People understand money in the end.
A credible strategy therefore has to manage both sides of the equation. It invests deliberately in the capabilities that can grow value, while remaining conscious of the costs accumulated in the process.
What I would do on Monday morning
Imagine a CEO tells me:
“The strategy is clear. Everyone is busy. We review dozens of metrics every week. But we keep missing the result.”
I would not propose a two-week strategy exercise.
I would start with a short, direct session to understand what drives value and where it is being lost.
If the company has a growth problem, we examine the drivers expected to create that growth and determine why they are not working. If the company is producing a loss, we identify the drivers carrying that loss into the final result.
Then we establish who owns each of them, what resources they control, and what evidence will tell us whether the intervention is working.
This is not about producing another presentation. Once you know how to trace value through a company, the initial diagnosis is often less mysterious than the organization has allowed it to become.
The difficult part is rarely finding more things to do.
It is deciding what matters, assigning real ownership, and putting the company’s money and attention behind it.