The 7 Core Strategic Pillars You Need To Be Thinking About In Your Business

Growing a business is hard. 

There’s no point in beating around the bush. Owning a business means difficult decisions, experiencing highs and lows and everything else that accompanies the title of ‘business owner’. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t make growing a business a little easier for yourself. My biggest tip? Get evaluating, setting goals and working towards them. 

However, there are a few things in particular that you need to know before you go randomly setting goals that seemingly fit with what you want to achieve. You need to be strategic. One of the best ways to do this is to understand how to build your goals around the 7 core pillars of business.  

I won’t get ahead of myself though, this article is all about the 7 pillars; what they are and how they exist in your business! Let’s get started…

Pillar 1: Business operations

As someone whose business mission is to ‘change the world through operations’ you can probably guess that I view this as a pretty big and important pillar when it comes to business! 

You can view business operations as the engine behind your business. This helps you run it (hopefully efficiently!). Essentially, anything that is a process or tech tool in your business counts as an operation. 

Processes are anything you do in your business that are repetitive such as how you create your customer experience or your client onboarding/offboarding. Tech tools are any systems or software you use to help you carry out these processes like payment processors or project management systems.

Pillar 2: Team: talent and culture 

Your team (or future team) is a pretty big part of business. I’ve broken it down into two elements because I think it’s important to think about both when working with a team. 

So you have the talent, who are the people that help you run your business. This includes everyone from your assistant, to subcontractors to direct employees and even your accountant. Then you have the culture. This is how your team feels when working with you and the environment you’ve created for your team to thrive! 

Pillar 3: Marketing and sales

This is probably the most talked about pillar in the business world. Everyone loves discussing marketing and sales, right? But I want to start by clarifying that marketing and sales are not the same things! Yes, they go together really well (like PB & J) but they are not the same thing.  

Marketing is how you drive your customers and clients into your brand whereas sales is how you convert them into paying customers who buy your product or service. 

Pillar 4: Offer/product suite

I’d say this is another big pillar…but they are all big pillars (that’s why they’re pillars!). 

Your offer/product suite is everything about what you’re selling. 

From the offers/products themselves to how you deliver them, the actual deliverables, how you get them to your customers and even how much it all costs.

Basically, anything you’ve sold in the past, any current offers/products or any future offers/products all fit into this category! 

Pillar 5: Financials 

This probably goes without saying but the financials pillar is all about any money metrics in your business.  I’m talking pricing, investments, margins and your overall business stability.

Pillar 6: Client/customer experience 

This is how your clients/customers experience you and your business. This includes everything from your initial marketing, all the way through to the delivery and the post-sales nurture. 

However, I often see the post-sales nurture missing from a lot of businesses. So one of my top tips would be to start adding in this step if you are not already!

The idea is that once you’ve delivered your service or product, don’t stop communicating with your client/customer!  I don’t mean just sending them the odd email. You need to have a process in place to check on them. Think about the ways you can find out how they are doing with their deliverable/product. This is great for feedback so you can refine your product/offer and also use it for marketing purposes like social proof!

Pillar 7: Continuing education 

This feels like the forgotten pillar to me but it is really important as a business owner, to be continually growing and expanding your knowledge! Whether that’s on how to make a product better or more cost-effective, refining your ‘tools of the trade’ or learning how to lead people better as a business owner.

 As you’re growing, so much of your business comes from you. So if you aren’t expanding your horizons, learning and developing, your business will suffer. 

How these pillars fit with your plan

So by now, you’re probably asking  ‘But Rachel, how can I create plans with these pillars?’. Well, allow me to explain…

First of all, you need to think about your vision. 

When you first started your business, what was the goal? Think about why you started it and what problem you wanted to solve.

Then I want you to think about where you want to be in 5-10 years’ time. I know it’s a cliche question but bare with me because it’s a really important one!

The reason you need to reassess your business goals since you first started is that they are very likely to have changed. 

Take my business goals for example. When I started 2 years ago, I was just freelancing to earn some extra money to support my family. Then the pandemic hit (bet ya didn’t see that coming) and I started to notice a gap in the market where I knew my specific skill set could help a lot of people. 

So over time, my vision changed to become what is now MBS’s mission statement: 

To change the world through operations. 

So the reason I say you need to think about where you want to be in 5-10 years is that it will directly correlate with what you need to be doing in your business now and how you need to be acting as a business owner.

You need to make sure each decision aligns with the bigger goal and the way to keep consistent with your overall vision is to start prioritising the pillars in your business that are going to help you best lay the foundations to reach that goal. 

Don’t worry, I’m not just going to drop all this information and run for the hills, I’ve got another article I’m going to be posting soon that explains how to actively work towards your goals using these pillars…and I have a question for you that I’m very curious to see your answer to. 

Keep an eye out for the next article and turn on my notifications so you don’t miss it!