Insight: The importance of Strategy in business

Paul: If there were one or two really important lessons that you could draw from your experiences, I mean, what sort of things would they be? 

There's one really big one that shouts at me every time I look back at my business career and my business life:

The importance of strategy

I spent most of my life doing things right, if you like, rather than necessarily doing the right things. I was very good at running business. I really enjoyed running a lean, smart business. But I've learned that being in the right place at the right time is far more important than doing the right things.

In my career I never did that. MD2MD is, to be quite blunt, quite a difficult sell. Nobody comes along and says, I've got a budget to buy a business peer group for the MD. I've never come across anybody having a budget for that. So you're always selling against not spending anything.

Even worse than that, you're selling against them going to the chairman and saying I want to spend some money on myself; to spend some money on my own development. That doesn't go down very well. Often the response is surely you're good enough because that's why we appointed you MD and anyway, if you need help I can help you! So it's a really tricky sell. People do understand the value and we have been successful, but it wasn't the easiest sell in the world. 

If I've been selling say solar panels, I might have made a lot more money and been a lot more successful. I wouldn't have had much fun, and I wouldn't have learnt as much.

So you need to be in the right place at the right time. 

And extract from an interview with Paul Essery. Full interview available here