Get This One Thing Wrong and Nothing Else Matters

I've written about Curt Cignetti and the Indiana Hoosiers. I've written about exit planning and what buyers see that founders miss. I've written about the nine value drivers that determine what your business is worth.

All of it traces back to the same place.

Strategy.

Not strategy as a buzzword. Not strategy as the slide deck you built three years ago and haven't opened since. Strategy as the foundational decision that determines whether everything else you do compounds — or cancels itself out.

Get it right, and people, execution, and cash all get easier. Get it wrong, and no amount of talent, effort, or capital will save you.

The Four Decisions Every Business Must Get Right

Within the Scaling Up framework, there are four critical decisions every growing business must master: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.

Most founders spend the majority of their time on execution and cash. Those feel urgent. They show up in your inbox every morning.

People gets attention when something breaks — a bad hire, a departure, a team dynamic that's quietly been eroding for months.

Strategy? Strategy is the one that gets scheduled and rescheduled. The one that feels important but never quite feels on fire.

That sequencing is exactly backwards.

Strategy isn't one of the four decisions. It's the decision the other three depend on.

What Strategy Actually Is

Strategy answers three questions:

Who is your customer — specifically, not generically?

How do you serve them in a way no one else does?

How do you win decisively and repeatedly in that space?

When those questions have clear, differentiated answers, everything else in the business has direction. Your people know what they're optimizing for. Your execution has a target. Your cash has a purpose.

When those questions are fuzzy — or when the answers sound like every other company in your category — you don't have a strategy problem. You have a foundation problem. And you can feel it everywhere.

What I Learned Building Enjoy Life Foods

In 2001, I made a strategic decision that defined the next 14 years.

I wasn't going to build another food company. I was going to build the food company for the one population the entire industry had ignored — people with food allergies and dietary restrictions who wanted to eat food that tasted good and felt normal.

Radical inclusion through subtraction. Remove the top eight allergens. Open the door to everyone who had been shut out.

That decision wasn't obvious. The category didn't exist yet. Retailers weren't asking for it. Most of my early conversations ended with polite skepticism.

But because the strategic decision was clear — who we served, how we served them differently, and why we would win — every other decision that followed had a filter. Which products to build. Which retailers to prioritize. Which hires mattered most. Which partnerships made sense. Which opportunities to pass on.

Strategy didn't just point the company in a direction. It made the company legible — to our team, to our customers, and eventually to the acquirers who paid for what we built.

Mondelez wasn't buying our revenue. They were buying our strategic position. A defensible, differentiated foothold in a category with a passionate and underserved customer base.

That position started with a decision made in year one.

The Cignetti Parallel

When Curt Cignetti took over Indiana football, he didn't wait for better talent. He installed a system — a way of playing, a set of standards, a culture of execution — and let that system determine outcomes before the recruiting rankings caught up.

I wrote about that story because the business parallel is so direct.

But here's what I didn't fully unpack then: before Cignetti could install that system, he had to know what kind of team he was building. What style of play. What kind of player thrived in his culture. What winning looked like for Indiana specifically — not for Ohio State, not for Alabama, for Indiana.

That's strategy. And it came first.

The execution was extraordinary. But it was in service of something. A clear picture of who Indiana was going to be and how they were going to win.

Without that picture, the execution is just activity.

Why Founders Get This Backwards

Most founders don't skip strategy on purpose. They skip it because it's hard, because it's uncomfortable, and because the returns aren't visible in the next 90 days.

It's easier to hire another salesperson than to ask whether you're selling to the right customer. It's easier to add a product line than to ask whether your current line is truly differentiated. It's easier to fix execution problems than to admit that the execution problems are symptoms of a strategy that was never fully resolved.

I see this constantly in the companies I coach or have advised. The founder is brilliant. The team is capable. The product is genuinely good. And yet growth is harder than it should be, the business feels chaotic, and no one can quite articulate why.

Nine times out of ten, the answer is upstream. The strategy was never made explicit, never made specific, never made into something the whole organization could orient around.

And so the team is capable but not aligned. The execution is busy but not compounding. The cash is flowing but not accumulating the way it should.

The Practical Test

Here is a simple diagnostic I use with leadership teams.

Ask every person on your senior team — independently, without discussion — to write down the answers to these three questions:

Who is our ideal customer, described specifically enough that we could identify them in a room?

What do we do for them that no one else does as well?

Why do we win when we win?

Then compare the answers.

If they converge — if five people in five different seats describe the same customer, the same differentiation, and the same reason you win — you have a strategy. It may need refinement, but it exists.

If the answers diverge — if every person describes a slightly different customer, a slightly different value proposition, a slightly different reason for winning — you don't have a strategy problem yet. You have a clarity problem. And that clarity problem is the source of more downstream pain than most founders realize.‍

What Comes Next

Once strategy is clear, the other decisions get dramatically easier.

People: you know exactly what kind of person thrives in this business and what skills actually matter. Hiring gets sharper. Mismatches get caught earlier.

Execution: priorities stop competing. The team knows what they're building toward and what to say no to. Meetings get more productive. Accountability gets more natural.

Cash: capital flows to the right constraints instead of spreading thin across everything. The business becomes more legible to lenders, investors, and eventually acquirers.

This is the sequence that works. Not because it's theoretical — because it's what I've watched play out in my own company and in the companies I've coached.

Strategy first. Everything else follows.

One Last Thing

If you're a founder reading this and your honest answer is that your strategy has never been fully explicit — written down, stress-tested, shared across the leadership team, and used as an actual decision filter — you're not alone.

Most companies in the $10M–$150M range are running on momentum, not strategy. The good news is that momentum can take you a long way. The hard news is that it has a ceiling, and that ceiling tends to show up at the worst possible time — when you're trying to scale, raise capital, or sell.

The founders who clear that ceiling aren't necessarily smarter or better resourced. They just made the foundational decision earlier, more explicitly, and more deliberately.

That decision is strategy. And it comes first.

Scott Mandell is a certified Scaling Up coach and the founder of Mandell Strategic Growth. He founded and scaled Enjoy Life Foods from startup to a successful acquisition by Mondelez International in 2015. He works with founder-led and privately held middle market companies in the $10M–$150M range. Schedule a call to talk about your business.