If the strategy cannot be applied by someone else to a situation you did not anticipate, it is not strategy. It is your judgment.
Judgment is the ability to make a good call in a specific situation. Strategy is a set of decisions clear enough that other people can make good calls in situations you never considered.
Most owners have excellent judgment and no strategy. That works until the volume of situations exceeds the number you can personally rule on.
Ask three of your leaders separately where the company will not compete.
Not where it competes. Where it will not. Which customers you turn down, which work you decline, which markets you deliberately leave alone. If the answers differ, or if they are vague, the strategy is in your head. What the team has is a general sense of direction and a habit of checking.
The second test is pricing. If your team cannot explain why the work is worth what you charge, they will discount it under pressure, because they have nothing to hold onto.
Because it does not present as a strategy problem. It presents as an execution problem.
Deals get taken that should not have been. Priorities drift between quarters. Two departments optimize in different directions. All of that looks like discipline failure, so companies respond by pushing harder on accountability, which produces more effort against a target nobody has defined precisely enough to hit.
Write down what you are choosing and, more importantly, what you are giving up. A strategy with no sacrifice in it is a wish list, and wish lists cannot resolve tradeoffs, which is the only thing strategy is for.
Then check whether the leadership team has actually bought it. Not nodded at it. Bought it, in the sense that they will decline good revenue that does not fit. A strategy they have not bought is a document.
The purpose is diagnosis, not performance. We will tell you what we see, including when what you need is not us. If there is a fit, we say so directly. If there is not, we say that too.
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