Is Your Strategy Still Right for Your Business?

Is Your Strategy Still Right for Your Business?

By Tony Monisse

Most business owners I work with have a strategy. The question worth pausing on is whether it is still the right one in these challenging times

A strategy is not a document you write once and file. It is a considered set of choices about where your business will play, how it will win, and what capabilities it needs to deliver on that. Those choices made sense when you made them. But businesses evolve, markets shift, and the world around us keeps moving. What worked well two or three years ago may not be the right strategy for the business you are running today.

My experience is that strategies tend to fail quietly. Not with a dramatic event, but with a gradual drift. Growth slows a little. Winning feels harder than it should. The team is busy, but the energy is different. Often, the strategy has not failed. It has simply stopped fitting.

There are three reasons this tends to happen: 

The first is that your business has outgrown it. A strategy suited to a business finding its way looks quite different from one suited to a business that is scaling, maturing, or preparing for succession. Many businesses are, without realising it, running a start-up strategy on a more established operation.

The second is that the market has moved. In the current environment, this is particularly relevant. Cost pressures and shifting consumer confidence have changed what customers value and what they will pay. Technology, including AI, is beginning to affect how businesses compete and differentiate. Competitor behaviour is changing. Customer expectations, shaped by everything from social media to digital disruption, have shifted in ways that may be permanent. Any one of these forces can be enough to change the strategic equation.

Myer is a useful reference point. For decades the business operated a strategy built around large physical stores, broad product ranges, and periodic sales events. That model worked well in the market it was designed for, but as online shopping reshaped how Australians buy and international retailers entered with sharper positioning, the strategy began to look irrelevant in a market that no longer existed. To its credit, Myer recognised the need to change. The business has since pivoted its strategy around its MYER one loyalty program, now with 4.7 million active members, growing its online sales, and expanding beyond the department store model. The turnaround is still a work in progress, but the shift happened because leadership was willing to ask an uncomfortable question: is the strategy we have still right for the market we are in?

The third, and perhaps the most uncomfortable, is the human one. When a strategy has served a business well, it can quietly move from being a live tool to something closer to a personal philosophy. It gets repeated, referenced, and defended rather than examined. Busyness crowds out the time and space needed to ask genuinely honest questions. And in many owner-led businesses, the strategy exists largely in the owner’s head, expressed through daily decisions. That works until it does not.

Strategic clarity is not a one-time achievement. It is a recurring act of challenging questioning.

A few questions worth asking:

• Is your strategy written for the business you have today, or the business you were two or three years ago?
• If you were to write your strategy from scratch right now, with full knowledge of the current market, would it look the same?
• When did you last genuinely challenge your strategy, rather than simply reaffirm it?
• Would a smart person outside your business look at your strategy and your operation and agree they work together?
• Is your strategy something you are actively using to make decisions, or something you refer to in order to justify decisions you have already made?

If any of those questions cause you to pause, it may be worth making the time to look at whether your strategy still fits. The businesses that tend to get this right are not necessarily the ones with the best strategies. They are the ones with the discipline to keep asking whether their strategy remains relevant.