Defining strategy for start-ups

(It’s a little different than defining strategy for current or potential clients.)

A couple weeks ago R/GA San Francisco welcomed a new group of tenants for the next three months: ten startups selected for the Connected Commerce Accelerator program, in partnership with Westfield Labs. The startups are reinventing the shopping journey for the connected age — from messaging bots, to visual recognition and connected experience technologies, to innovations in fulfillment, returns, and staff training.

Week 3 was all about helping the startups define their value propositions, their brands and sharpen their pitch stories. And when you’ve worked within agencies for 19 years, whether an ad agency, digital agency, or a not-an-agency type agency, for better-or-worse you become trained to work a certain way. A way that starts to feel very normal and becomes hard to break. Until you work with start-ups. Then, even the most “we’re-so-collaborative-and-agile” types will need to rethink how work is done.

It was pretty much the opposite of working on a pitch.

Here’s how:

1. Be comfortable with your own thinking. In pitches, we discuss, debate, stew, simmer, gather, discuss, debate and ultimately improve thinking as a group until we get there. And that process is proven and works. But the start-up team is too lean and time is too valuable. You will not, and cannot, spend hours with 7 agency peers from multiple disciplines writing, then rewriting again and again, the perfect headline/positioning statement/strategic idea.
2. Be comfortable without the polish. There are no designers to make your strategic documents look amazing, your thinking needs to shine.
3. A worksession is really, truly a worksession. It’s not a room peppered with insights and learnings carefully leading the client to a specific direction that you hope they love. It’s really about rolling-up-sleeves, sharing, listening, editing and evolving.
4. Working with the top gets you there faster. This is obvious, and all agencies attempt to swim upstream and avoid layers of interpretation. But working with the top makes it easier and faster to define clear problems and improve thinking.
5. Things will change the minute they have a new business meeting with a new audience that goes well. Their business is not yet defined, and the definition comes through action. It’s important to be comfortable shifting audiences, emphasis, even business models.
6. Build for today’s reality and tomorrow’s possibilities. The majority of companies we work with as agencies are well-established in their categories, or looking to agencies to help re-establish them now. A start-up is making its way based on a set of features and benefits today, and a pipe-line of more that will change it’s course. It’s difficult to define a POV and position that is specific for today but flexible for what will change later today.
7. There isn’t much room for theory or strategy documents. The teams need strategy and thinking they can apply immediately. It’s humbling to look at frameworks you’ve used regularly and see they are pretty damn meaningless to a team of people building and hustling a new software platform.

That said, there are some things that won’t ever change:

• Storytelling reigns. Everyone needs help framing a clear, compelling story with a strong POV, with drama and tension around the problem they are solving in the world.
• Insights drive great strategy and story. Insights from culture, category, company and consumer still form the foundation of a good story and POV. You just have a helluva lot less time to mine them.
• Confidence. Both clients and startups need confidence they are making the most-right decision possible today. You need to have it and convey it. Without your partners and designers at your back.

The ultimate test of our usefulness comes at Demo Day in late October, where we see their stories and pitches in action. I’m optimistic. And refreshed by the reminder of what can be achieved by small, tight teams.

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