Ep. 178 — Greg Meredith: Your EOS Rocks Are Not a Strategy

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Episode Summary

You filled out the VTO. You’ve got rocks. The team is hitting quarterly priorities. And if a buyer asks you to articulate your strategy in one sentence, you go silent, because what you actually have is a set of action items pointed at a goal nobody stress-tested. That gap is what this episode is about. I brought Greg Meredith on because he’s spent 15 years walking small and mid-sized companies through a 10-step process he calls Simply Strategic, and the thing he keeps running into is owners who confuse strategic planning with execution rhythm. We got into the real definition of strategy (creating a sustainable competitive advantage through the acquisition, organization, and deployment of assets), why opportunistic founders hit a ceiling around $5M and can’t make the prescriptive turn, the McDonald’s-as-real-estate story, the Norm Brodsky storage-as-real-estate story, the Ansoff Matrix, the flywheel, the Bullseye, and AG Lafley’s Opposite Rule (if the opposite of your strategy is absurd, you don’t have a strategy). We closed on why none of this matters if it doesn’t translate back to the financials, because accounting is the language of business.

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## Top 10 Takeaways
  1. Strategic planning is the process. The strategies it produces are the output. If you can’t name yours, you didn’t do the work.
  2. Your EOS or Rockefeller plan is an efficient engine. Without strategy, it drives you the wrong direction faster.
  3. Opportunistic strategy gets you from zero to $2M. Prescriptive strategy gets you past it. Most founders never make the switch.
  4. Strategy is how you build a sustainable competitive advantage through the assets you acquire, organize, and deploy.
  5. If you don’t have a sustainable competitive advantage, you’re fighting on margin and your business carries real risk.
  6. Your doctrines (what you believe about who you are) define your destiny, whether you articulate them or not.
  7. Apply the Opposite Rule: if the opposite of your strategy is absurd, it’s not a strategy. It’s a table stake.
  8. New products in new markets is two to three times harder to win. Make a compelling case for why you, not someone else.
  9. Pick your Bullseye before you pick your strategies. “Grow 3% per year” and “double in three years” need different plans.
  10. If your strategy doesn’t translate back to the P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow, you’re succeeding by luck, not skill.

Sound Bites

“Strategic planning is the process by which you come up with compelling strategies. But you can do a whole lot of strategic planning and have clients tell me, hey, we’ve done strategic planning. Then I ask them to explain their strategies and they are silent.” (@00:05:43) — Greg Meredith

“Strategy tells you what you should be doing. How are you going to win, where are you going to play. You funnel that into a really great professional management system to execute. If you’re pointed at the wrong thing, an efficient engine is going to take you in the wrong direction faster.” (@00:08:52) — Greg Meredith

“I learned all this because I was a Visionary entrepreneur sitting at the bar at a trade show, hearing what someone in Atlanta was doing, going home, and implementing it. We literally ended up competing with Culligan in water filtration. We were our own worst nightmare because we didn’t realize our personalities were driving our strategy.” (@00:10:18) — Ryan Tansom

“AG Lafley called it the Opposite Rule. If the opposite of your strategy is absurd, you need to keep working. If your strategy is ‘hire great people,’ the opposite is ‘hire terrible people.’ That’s not a strategy. That’s something everyone wants to do.” (@00:57:08) — Greg Meredith

“Warren Buffett says accounting is the language of business. You can hit three objectives for the quarter and feel great. Then you look at the cash flow statement and you have zero dollars in the bank, or your P&L has a 2% margin, and the bank will never loan you another dime.” (@00:52:57) — Greg Meredith

About This Episode

Greg Meredith is a strategic planning consultant based in Dayton, Ohio. He holds an MBA from Ohio State, ran his own consulting practice out of graduate school, served as Director of Consulting for the CPA firm Brixey & Meyer, and currently owns a small manufacturing business in addition to consulting. He developed the 10-step Simply Strategic process after 15+ years of working with small and mid-sized companies and noticing the same gap over and over: owners who had filled out the forms but couldn’t articulate a single compelling strategy. This is Episode 2 of the Value Growth Series, focused on the Planning value driver.

Resources Mentioned

  • Greg Meredith on LinkedIn — Search “Greg Meredith Dayton” — linkedin.com/in/gregmeredith
  • Greg’s email — dgmeredith@gmail.com
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins — Source of the flywheel concept Greg uses with clients
  • Acquired podcast — Referenced for the Shopify / Tobi Lütke story on the opportunistic-to-prescriptive turn
  • BCG Growth-Share Matrix — Stars, cash cows, question marks, dogs
  • Ansoff Matrix — Existing/new products against existing/new markets
  • AG Lafley — Former Procter & Gamble CEO, source of the Opposite Rule
  • Traction / EOS (Gino Wickman) — Referenced as the execution operating system that sits downstream of strategy
  • Norm Brodsky — Document storage business reframed as real estate, prior Ryan interview
  • Warren Buffett — “Accounting is the language of business”

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