Many entrepreneurs start with passion and a promising idea. However, many founders move directly into production or selling without a clear understanding of why customers would choose their product or how the business will consistently deliver value.
This results in avoidable mistakes, wasted resources, and missed growth opportunities.
A solid business strategy fills this gap. It is an essential tool entrepreneurs utilise at every stage, knowingly or not. Whether you are starting or scaling, strategy begins with one foundational question: “What job is my customer trying to get done?” This simple idea shapes everything from your value proposition and product design to operations and customer acquisition. Below are a few steps to solidify the strategy in your business:
Understand the Job You’re Helping Customers Accomplish
People don’t buy products; they hire them to get a job done. These products or services help a customer to achieve something. Understanding the job means understanding the customer’s desired outcome, enabling you to deliver meaningful products.
To find it, ask yourself questions like: What outcomes do my customers want to see? What will “success” look like for them? The answers should show you the ‘so that’ behind your customer decisions, away from any product.
A farmer hires fertiliser to increase yields, while a parent hires tuition so their child can pass exams. This clarity ensures your business is built around real customer needs, not assumptions.
Identify Who Has This Job and the Barriers They Face
Once you identify the jobs your business is addressing, focus on the barriers standing in their way. Most customers face one or more of these challenges:
- Financial limitations – They have a limited budget to address the job.
- Time constraints – They’re too busy to do the job.
- Location issues – Their location gets in the way of achieving their desired outcome.
- Skills gaps – They lack the required expertise to get the job done.
These barriers are not exhaustive, but they are common across most market segments and greatly influence the solutions customers choose. Your role as an entrepreneur is to focus on the barriers that matter most.
A farmer seeking higher yields may have limited funds and limited know-how. A business helping farmers achieve higher yields also needs to ensure farmers are educated on how to implement solutions, such as fertilisers or other inputs, within their limited budgets.
To address these common barriers, consider the following strategies:
- If money is the main barrier → offer a lean, affordable version of the solution.
- If time is the issue → adjust operating hours to match customer schedules.
- If location is the issue → bring your solution closer or offer delivery.
- If skills are the issue → design solutions that require minimal specialised knowledge.
When thinking through your business, founders must understand that customers are loyal to the job, not the solution. Brand loyalty, competitive pricing or product quality are secondary considerations after the job and barriers. A customer who loses a high-end smartphone may downgrade to a feature phone if money is tight, because the essential job (staying connected) is the biggest consideration.
Assess How Customers Currently Get the Job Done
Customer needs (Jobs in this context) exist whether or not your business or the solutions you offer are involved. Customers are therefore already solving or trying to solve their problems in some way.
Understanding their current options helps you identify:
- Direct Competitors to your business and substitutes available to your target markets
- Gaps in any of the existing solutions
- Underserved customer groups
- Opportunities to deliver better value
This understanding of the customer’s current landscape helps you identify frustrations and unmet needs, enabling you to position your business more effectively.
Determine Your Customer Value
With an understanding of the key jobs and barriers your customers face, you can define with clarity the value your solution delivers. It ensures that it is not an idealistic statement but an actual promise you make to customers.
Your value could be: “We help you get the job done affordably, conveniently, or reliably.” When thinking through your values, you do not have to solve everything.
Choose the job and challenges you can solve consistently and profitably. This ensures you focus your (often limited) resources on delivering the most value to your customers and your business.
Identify What’s Critical to Get Right
Once you are clear on the customer value you would like to deliver, you can focus on structuring your operations to deliver it. It is at this point that you identify the elements your business must get right and get right consistently to deliver on your promise and do so profitably. These might include:
- Reliable access to raw materials
- Skilled and dependable staff
- Efficient production processes and equipment
- Strong distribution channels
- Compliance with standards and regulations
These factors are influenced by the promise of value to your customers and are not good to have. For example, a honey processor promising a healthy sweetener must secure pure, unadulterated honey and follow compliant production processes.
Without these basics, marketing and branding will not sustain the business. Focus on what is essential for your business. Get the “must-haves” right before investing in “nice-to-haves.”
Turn Critical Factors into Concrete Initiatives
Your critical success factors will likely remain constant as your business grows; however, the actions you take to implement them will change over time.
It is therefore key to critique the factors and identify any gaps that get in the way of you actualising your key success factors. Based on these gaps, you can develop specific initiatives to close them.
Initiatives tied to key success factors may include securing dependable suppliers to ensure you always have reliable access to raw materials or to ensure efficient production processes. These initiatives advise the day-to-day actions that drive long-term success.
Know How You’ll Attract and Retain Customers
A key component of any business strategy is customers. Even the best-designed strategy cannot succeed without them. As a founder, you must clearly understand:
- Who your customers are
- Where they are likely to be found
- How you will reach them once you find them
- What you will tell them
Effective messaging can be centred on identifying the symptoms or triggers that signal to customers that their job is not being achieved, and push them to seek a solution.
An accounting firm might build its message around “never missing another tax deadline,” a pain point that immediately resonates with SMEs.
Messages that speak to real frustrations and triggers help customers see how your product or service is a good-fit solution for them.
Building a strong business strategy requires a good understanding of your customer, the value that matters most to them, and the activities to focus on that actualise that value.
Conclusion
Start with the job your customer is trying to get done and the barriers to it. Design a solution that meaningfully addresses both. Identify the critical factors your business must get right, and build initiatives to strengthen them. Finally, engage customers where they are, with messages that connect to their real needs.
Strategy is not a one-off exercise. It is a continuous process of learning, refining, and aligning your actions with what your customers truly need.
Mr Mwatu Musili is a Business Consultant at WYLDE International. You may connect with Mwatu via email: [email protected]
Also Read: Your business is designed to deliver the results you see
