IT services founders feel like they are being pulled in all directions. This is the reality of being a founder, and the only way for a founder to survive is by doing less and focusing on the most important work. We talk about how positioning adds a focus to allow your sales and marketing teams to get more customers and your delivery team to provide better services. Positioning allows the CEO to align the entire company and focus their efforts to maximize the impact.
We are familiar with positioning in the context of a go-to-market strategy. But the principle at play is more fundamental than that. Positioning guides your GTM strategy because it guides the value you provide. It is the reason you exist as a business. Sun Tzu called this the Moral Law and the first condition for victory. Your value proposition is the principle that your employees are staking their livelihood on.
Going deeper than the value proposition is how the machinery of the business comes together to create that value for your customers. This is called the value chain. As you scale, you need to understand your value chain deeply. Understanding how we can better serve the customer. This includes delivery, sales, marketing, operations, HR, etc. A focused positioning allows every part of the company to understand better how they are coming together with the larger business in acquiring customers and creating value for them. In addition, it will allow them to understand how they relate to other parts of the organization.
A CEO gets the different parts of the company working together in unison. In other words, it is to align the business. When your teams work together in unison, they achieve business outcomes rather than hit intermediate KPIs. The clarity you achieve in your business's value proposition and value chain through crisp positioning sets the stage for aligning the team members. Everyone has greater clarity about their role in the business and how it creates value for the business.
This changes the dynamic of your business. With a greater understanding of the needs of the business, your team can act more autonomously while still serving the common mission. You will need to communicate less in detail and be able to unlock the creative powers of your team better. Most businesses have silos that form around business units, which cause conflict at the interface. Marketing is frustrated that their deals are not getting priority by the sales team, and sales is frustrated that the marketing team is not providing good leads. Delivery is frustrated that sales are making promises that can’t be maintained, and sales is frustrated that delivery is being too cautious. Your business is not alone in this. These problems are almost intractable if looked at with a tactical lens. But a focused strategic positioning adds a new lens. The increased understanding of your business allows your team to experiment and align the team around the common goal.
A startup always needs to experiment and learn more. But you have limited time, money, and people. So you need to focus your experimentation on what is most likely to work. This is where positioning comes in. It reduces the number of experiments you can try and conserves resources. After all, it’s not just about experimentation. The key is to double down on the successful experiments. Adding a focus allows you to more easily evaluate your experiments and allocate resources to doubling down on your successes.
Conserving resources is critical to any business. The cost of growth you want to adopt for your business must always be balanced. But every business has limited resources, and it must conserve its resources both at the strategic and tactical levels to be impactful. Positioning creates strategic constraints, allowing you to conserve your resources.
All of this comes together to create the essential ingredients for scaling your startup. You understand your customer and the value you provide to them, so you are able to create processes between your selling and delivery organizations to acquire and retain customers. People understand their place and are able to create processes and coordinate more effectively. You develop systems better to allocate your resources to the most critical problems.
Positioning not only helps you in the day-to-day running of your business, it also forms the foundation of an M&A thesis. As a founder, you need to have a direction for the business. Similar to how, as a parent, your goal is to enable your children to grow to be independent and exceed you. You should set your business up in such a way that it can grow without you. You don’t have to pursue an acquisition, but building an acquirable business ensures you are building systems that will allow you to scale your business better. It also creates a sense of freedom in your work in knowing that you are choosing to run the business, and it isn’t a necessity.
A focused positioning creates a thesis for potential acquirers. Because you are focused, a strategic acquirer can match your business against their current business and can identify the gap you would fill.
Too many IT services founders burn themselves out by trying to do everything, chasing every lead, fixing every problem, and experimenting without focus. They overwhelm themselves without realizing where their time and energy are going, only to end up exhausted and frustrated. Weak positioning isn’t just a market killer, as it quietly kills the founder’s ambition. Startups with bold visions often fade after a few years because they run only on the founder’s willpower. But scaling requires more. It takes a united team, aligned by clear positioning, placing their effort where it actually bears fruit.
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