Building Momentum: How to Create Your Strategic Flywheel
Have you ever tried to skin a cat?
Me neither—and I’m not sure who thought it necessary to discover there’s more than one way to do it.
Anyway, there’s also more than one way to run a business. The trick is finding the approach that works for you. (See my previous article on Following Your Resonance for inspiration.)
Today, I want to focus on something every business must define: its scope of products and services. How do you decide what to specialize on? How do you define your scope?
When I started Widerfunnel, I understood frameworks such as Porter’s Generic Strategies, BCG matrix, and Blue Ocean Strategy (which is still a classic!) They were helpful but didn’t complete the strategic picture for me.
At the same time, I was hearing from advisors that I needed to focus Widerfunnel on an industry specialization. “All successful agencies focus on one or a few industries”, they told me. But their advice didn’t resonate with me.
I decided we would specialize in one service—A/B testing—for clients across industries. Why? I believed that human behaviour would end up being similar across industries. The more experiments we ran in all industries, the more complete our insights about human behaviour became. That insight guided our focus strategy.
But it wasn’t until I learned about Jim Collins’ Strategic Flywheel that I fully understood why this approach worked.
What is a Flywheel?
The Flywheel identifies the outcomes of specific strategic actions that lead to differentiated strengths. Each step in the Flywheel creates outcomes that couldn’t otherwise be accomplished. It leads to a brilliant insight when you find strategic actions that inevitably circle back to the first step. Once you’ve defined those steps, you know the few actions that are critical to the growth of your business.
Focus spins the Flywheel
Identifying your business’ Flywheel automatically tells you where to focus your efforts. Any resources put toward other areas distract from your potential to accelerate your Flywheel.
At Widerfunnel, I intuitively knew that we needed to focus on “A/B testing for high traffic brands across industries.” I believed the only way we could become the best in the world would be if we only provided that single service.
The Flywheel shows why that was true. At the core of a Flywheel is momentum—each step feeds into the next, creating an engine for accelerating growth. Any effort we expended learning and providing other services would dilute our Flywheel momentum.
My Flywheel in Action
As an example, here’s how ours looked at Widerfunnel:
Step 1. Attract experimentation clients
We focused exclusively on brands with the traffic volume to support rapid experimentation. Our competitors, in contrast, also offered other services like consulting, website design, SEO, web analytics, and paid search management.
It would have made our early business a lot easier if we’d offered other services too. But, I knew from studying Blue Ocean Strategy that those were Red Ocean markets. There were thousands of providers of those services. And I was convinced that we had to avoid:
Opportunity Cost. If we diverted any of our limited time to providing other services, we would not be learning about our core service, which we wanted to be the best in the world at.
Complexity. The more services we offered, the more complexity we’d have inside our business, which would narrow our margins.
The more experiments we ran, the faster we would…
Step 2. Run more experiments
Every business has limited resources, including time, attention, and capital. By focusing on experiments, all our resources were focused on gaining validated insights from experiments, which led to…
Step 3. Enhanced expertise
We learned how to run better experiments faster than others. This led to…
Step 4. Better client results
We produced a higher experiment success rate for our clients, which led to…
Step 5. Better client relationships
Our clients were highly satisfied with our services and wanted to support us, which led to the most important lynchpin that completed the circle…
Step 6. High profile case studies
Results with big-name clients attracted even more high-quality leads, restarting the cycle. Our case studies led to popular blog content, influencer mentions, conference speaking invitations, which attracted more of the same high quality clients.
This Flywheel worked because we doubled down on what we wanted to be the best at, resisting the temptation to diversify prematurely. That focus minimized complexity and amplified results.
What’s important to notice is that if we hadn’t captured each step in that Flywheel, it would have broken and lost the momentum. We could have done the first 5 steps perfectly, but if we didn’t publish case studies of our work, we would lose all that value to attract new clients.
That became our strategic lynchpin that I reminded our team to focus on month after month. One of my most important tasks as CEO was to repeatedly ask, “How could we turn this into a published case study?”
Every company is different
This isn’t the only way to run a business. Some companies succeed by specializing in an industry and offering a wide range of services. Their Flywheel looks different, but it works for them.
The key is knowing what you want your Flywheel to be—and sticking to it.
What’s your flywheel?
Have you defined your product or service strategy?
Do you know the core steps driving your business momentum?
Or does this kind of strategic planning feel like overthinking? I’d love to hear your perspective.
