Talk to any investor and one of the first things he or she will ask you about your business is, “What’s your strategy?” Investors want to know how you plan to win in the marketplace and, in the process, meet their financial expectations. When they evaluate risk, your battle plan is front and center.
But as Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” His point was that, in the middle of a fight (or the shifting market), circumstances can force you to embrace different actions or tactics than you had planned. If those circumstances are especially heated or volatile, you might even have to toss your original strategy to the wind and come up with an entirely new one.
