Blue Ocean Strategy for Solopreneurs: Focus on the Big Picture, Not the Numbers

You may recall, the first principle of Blue Ocean Strategy is the reconstruction of market boundaries. Without permission internally, and a process to break your industry boundaries, it will be impossible to move into blue oceans of uncontested market space. In today’s post, we learn how important the second principle is in blue ocean strategy for solopreneurs. Focus on the big picture, not the numbers.

The temptation when planning is to launch into a business plan or strategic plan and use templates that one finds online or using some process read about when researching a business, marketing, or strategic plan. I have been guilty of the same thing. Before I know it, I’ve played office and have spent a week mocking up fabulous charts, graphs, marketing and sales projections, and more.
Focus on the big picture
In blue ocean methodology, one works through a systematized visualization instead. The end result is a strategy canvas. The advantages of a strategy canvas are numerous.

By building a company’s strategic planning process around a canvas, a company and its managers focus on the big picture view and don’t get caught up in minutiae, details, numbers, and jargon. A strategy canvas shows a strategic profile of an industry by depicting key factors of competition.

Second, it shows the strategic profile of your company against the competition. You can glean lots of information about where the industry is investing through the careful construction of the strategy canvas.

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