Operating Inside Your Strategic Sweet Spot
Do you know your strategic sweet spot? When I first started my business, I didn’t. I had a marketable idea and saw a need, but I made the mistake of trying to be everything to everybody. I quickly learned that something had to change if I wanted to run a sustainable and profitable business.
It took me a few years, but I learned to hone my focus down to my strategic sweet spot: what I’m good at AND what can make money - AND what can help people in a big way. Now I can say NO to anything outside that zone, which creates more freedom and space to say YES to the things inside it.
What is a Strategic Sweet Spot?
Your strategic sweet spot lies at the intersection of what your business does well and what the market is willing to pay for. How do you meet your customers’ needs differently, better, or cheaper than the competition? That’s your sweet spot.
Jim Collins says it beautifully: The sweet spot concept “is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, or a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. This distinction is absolutely crucial.”
Rather than relying on one person’s specialty or unique capability, a strategic sweet spot speaks to the ORGANIZATIONAL capacity to meet the market’s needs in a way that competitors can’t (or don’t). Your sweet spot is like a muscle that must be exercised regularly and consistently by the entire organization. A sweet spot is not sustainable if only one person exercises that muscle.
How to Find Your Sweet Spot
If you need a little help getting clear on your organization’s sweet spot, start here:
Identify your core competencies rather than continually adding to the type of work you do.
Work across your strengths rather than trying to be all things to all people.
Match your best services or products to market demand.
Listen to what your clients/customers value most in what you do & how you do it.
Then, bring those elements together in a compelling & unique offer.
In some cases, your sweet spot might not be what you do or even how you do it. It could be WHY you do it. Patagonia, for example, is not the only company that makes high-quality outdoor clothing and gear. It is, however, unique in its mission: to build the best products while causing no unnecessary harm and using business to protect nature. That’s a solid sweet spot and why I often choose Patagonia over companies that make similar products.
Bringing Drishti to Your Sweet Spot
Once you’ve clearly identified your sweet spot, you must stay laser-focused on it to achieve your vision. This might sound easy, but opportunities to become distracted or get off track are abundant in today’s business world. It is your job as a leader to establish your sweet spot and not let anything distract you, or your team, from thriving inside it.
The clearer you become on who you are, what you do, and how and why you do it, the easier it will be to find your Drishti—the yogic practice of maintaining balance through a focused gaze. A sweet spot-oriented Drishti allows you to say no to projects, clients, and ideas that are not aligned with your strategic goals and priorities, all while reducing fatigue, overwhelm, and burnout. You will always be exhausted when you try to be everything to everybody. When you focus on your sweet spot, things flow easier and are less work.
Of course, cultivating your sweet-spot-Drishti doesn’t mean you can’t diversify your offerings or have other passions. Being clear on your strategic sweet spot makes it easier to do that because you won’t waste time chasing new ideas or concepts that exist far outside your organization’s unique capabilities. You can use your strategic sweet spot as a lens for evaluating all new ideas that come along to determine if they allow you to leverage the organizational strengths you’ve already developed.
Take this plastic surgeon I know. His sweet spot is the face, and he makes good money offering cosmetic surgery inside that sweet spot. He stays focused on that area but leverages that skill set to pursue other passions, like performing myofascial reconstruction for children in low-income, under-resourced countries. His high-revenue cosmetic surgeries allow him to offer those pro bono services to kids in need and other complimentary services to his patients, such as massages and injections. Ultimately, his sweet spot is making people feel great about their faces, and he finds many ways to fulfill that promise.
The Sweet Spot Difference
In my work as a fractional COO, I specialize in helping organizations fully align their systems and operations with their core values and long-term vision. Dialing in on a company’s sweet spot is essential to that work. When organizations find, return to, or refocus on their sweet spot—a sweet spot aligned with their purpose, values, and vision—they can dive deep into creating the systems and processes that allow them to truly thrive inside that space and take the lid off their potential for sustainable success.
If you need help bringing clarity and focus to what sets you apart from your competitors, let’s talk.