Series Introduction
When there is plenty of business to go around, doing what already works can be a very good strategy. But when the market is crowded and organizations or businesses are competing for the same people, the same dollars or the same attention, doing more of what everyone else is doing may not be enough.
That is when I start looking for the 5%.
Over the years, I have found myself asking organizations and businesses many of the same questions: Why are we doing this? Who are we really reaching? What is actually producing value? What are we assuming? And what might we be overlooking because our attention is concentrated in the same places as everyone else's?
When I talk about the 5%, I am not suggesting there is an actual five percent of the market waiting to be found. I am talking about looking beyond the places where everyone else is already concentrating. The 5% may be a small niche, an audience others are missing, a relationship no one has developed or a need that is not being met particularly well. It may never become the largest part of the business or the audience. It may simply add enough to help keep the pipeline fuller.
What are we missing? Who are we not reaching? What relationship has no one developed? What do people still need that they are not getting very well?
Sometimes the opportunity is even simpler than that. It may be something everyone knows is important, but very few people consistently do well.
This six-part series looks at how we can find those opportunities and decide what deserves more of our attention. It begins with the problem we are really trying to solve, looks at who we are reaching and who we may be missing, considers what people remember about interacting with us, and takes a broader look at diversification. It ends with one of the questions I believe matters most:
What evidence do we have that this is worth pursuing?
Finding the 5% is not about being different for the sake of being different. It is about noticing what others may have stopped noticing and deciding whether that small opportunity deserves some of our time, attention and resources.
STRATEGY BEYOND THE CROWD | PART 1
By Angie Thompson
At a recent business expo, I had the opportunity to visit with several smart, experienced business and marketing professionals. Rather than asking only what they sold or how they promoted it, I found myself asking a different set of questions: “Who is your competitor?” and “What is the biggest marketing challenge you face, and how are you overcoming it?”
The answers were revealing. These were knowledgeable people who understood their businesses, yet many found the questions surprisingly difficult to answer. They could tell me what they were doing. Describing precisely what they were up against, why it was creating a problem and how their strategy was addressing it was considerably harder.
What I heard sounded familiar because I have seen the same pattern in nonprofit organizations. Calendars fill with events, sponsorships, appeals, networking opportunities, social media and community activities. There is plenty of motion, but somewhere beneath all that activity is a question we may not stop long enough to answer:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Even the word competitor can send us in the wrong direction if we define it too narrowly. A consultant may compete with another consultant, but she may also be competing with a prospective client who decides to handle the work internally. A graphic designer may compete with another designer, but also with Canva, AI or someone deciding not to create anything at all. A nonprofit may be asking for a gift alongside dozens of other organizations, but it is also competing with every other demand for a donor's time, attention and financial resources.
Sometimes the competitor is not another organization or business. Sometimes it is simply another choice.
Understanding what we are actually up against matters because the problem should help determine the strategy. When we cannot clearly define the challenge in front of us, the easiest response is often to look sideways and see what everyone else is doing. The trouble is that another organization may be solving a completely different problem.
In one planning conversation, someone suggested, “We need to add another smaller event.” I agreed that a smaller opportunity to bring people together could be useful, but I did not think the answer was simply to create a smaller version of something already on the calendar. Instead, I developed a low-cost breakfast around an interesting guest speaker and kept the entire event to about 90 minutes.
The need may have been an additional point of connection, but the strategy did not have to look like everything we had already done. Sometimes the better response is not to reject the original idea, but to ask what problem it is supposed to solve and whether there is a simpler, more useful or less crowded way to solve it.
I have also watched calendars fill because we start looking sideways. We notice what others are doing and start adding our own versions of it: an event, a sponsorship, an appeal, a social media campaign or a table at the same gathering with many of the same people. Before long, the organization is busy and everyone can point to plenty of activity, while the harder question remains whether any of it is solving the problem we actually have.
That is when I return to one of the simplest questions I know:
Why are we doing this?
I use that question because it forces us to move beyond habit and examine the reason behind the activity. “Everyone else is doing it” may tell us something about the marketplace, but it does not tell us whether the activity deserves our time, money or attention.
If we cannot explain what we expect an activity to accomplish, who it is intended to reach and what evidence would tell us it is working, we may be confusing motion with strategy.
Best Practice and Strategy Are Not the Same Thing
Michael Porter made this distinction decades ago in his Harvard Business Review article, What Is Strategy? He separates operational effectiveness, doing familiar activities well, from strategy, which requires choices about what an organization will do differently, what it will not do and how those choices create a distinctive position.
Porter also warned that benchmarking and adopting the same best practices can gradually cause competitors to resemble one another. Everyone may become more efficient while becoming less distinguishable. In other words, an organization can become very good at doing exactly what everyone else is doing.
That problem is not limited to corporations. Nonprofits do it, small businesses do it and independent professionals do it. We see another organization succeeding with an idea and assume the safest response is to create our own version of it.
Sometimes that is completely reasonable. There is no value in being different merely for the sake of being different, and a proven practice can save time or provide a useful starting point. The problem begins when imitation replaces the harder work of deciding whether the activity actually fits our audience, our resources and the challenge we are trying to address.
When we haven't clearly identified our own problem, it is very easy to borrow somebody else's solution.
What Is Our Strategy?
I define strategy simply: Strategy is a deliberate choice about where we will concentrate limited resources to produce a result that matters.
That means thinking about what we want to accomplish and what we are actually willing to put behind it.
Every organization has limits. Money is limited, but so are staff time, volunteer energy, board attention, creative capacity and the audience's attention. Choosing to invest those resources in one place inevitably means there is less available somewhere else.
That is why “we should do this too” is not enough. A better discussion asks why we are doing it, who we are trying to reach, what should happen as a result and how we will know whether the investment was worthwhile.
It should also include a question organizations sometimes avoid: What are we willing to reduce, change or stop in order to make room for something that may create greater value?
Bridgespan makes a similar point in its work on nonprofit strategy. Its strategic-planning guidance emphasizes decisions about desired impact, priorities, resources and implementation rather than treating the planning document itself as the accomplishment.
Strategic planning can become one more activity on the calendar if we are not careful. A board gathers, staff prepare information, people spend hours examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and eventually a document is produced. There may be excellent thinking in that document, but the difficult work begins after everyone leaves the room.
Why Some Strategic Plans Disappear
I have participated in plenty of SWOT exercises and understand their value. Looking honestly at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats can help an organization understand where it stands.
But identifying an opportunity is not the same as knowing what to do with it. Recognizing a weakness does not automatically tell us how to correct it.
That may be one reason planning can feel so productive in the room and become much harder afterward. We still have to decide what we are actually going to do, why the choice makes sense and who will be responsible for moving it forward.
BoardSource includes SWOT among the tools organizations may use during planning, but it also describes a move away from rigid three-to-five-year plans toward more adaptable strategic frameworks supported by annual plans, metrics and timelines.
That makes sense to me. I have watched carefully prepared plans lose momentum surprisingly quickly. Sometimes the work is harder than expected. Sometimes the strategy becomes one more responsibility for people who are already stretched thin. Sometimes nobody really owns the next step.
And sometimes the strategy simply was not very good.
Perhaps it sounded good in the planning session but did not match the organization's capacity. Perhaps it was based on an assumption no one questioned, or it borrowed an idea that worked somewhere else without asking whether the circumstances were actually comparable.
A strategy may take time to produce its full result, but it still needs enough direction and ownership to keep moving after the planning session ends.
Different Does Not Have to Mean Dramatic
One of the most successful fundraising ideas I implemented was not particularly complicated. I added a giving day to the annual fundraising calendar at a time when other organizations around me were not using one in the same way, and it generated approximately $25,000 in clean revenue.
What matters about that story is not simply that the idea was different. The opportunity fit the organization, we could execute it with the resources available, the results were measurable and it created another reason for people to participate.
Being different helped create an opportunity, but difference alone was not the strategy.
That distinction matters because finding the 5% is not about looking for the most unusual idea in the room. Something is not a good strategy simply because nobody else is doing it. I still want to know why the opportunity matters and whether it fits the organization and the problem we are trying to solve. The opportunity often becomes easier to see when we understand what we are really up against, question why we are doing what we are doing and pay attention to what others may be missing.
One Thing to Try
Choose one recurring activity from your calendar, preferably something you have been doing for several years, and examine it without assuming it deserves to continue simply because it always has. Ask why you are doing it, who it is intended to reach, what problem it is supposed to solve and what result it has actually produced.
Then ask what you would genuinely lose if you stopped doing it tomorrow. Be honest!
You may discover that the activity creates more value than you realized, or you may discover that habit has been consuming resources that could be invested somewhere more useful.
Finally, imagine I met you at a business expo and asked the same questions I asked that day:
What are you really up against, and what are you doing about it?
If the answer comes easily, you are already moving beyond activity and toward strategy.
Sources & Further Reading
Michael E. Porter's What Is Strategy? distinguishes operational effectiveness from strategy and argues that meaningful strategy requires choices, tradeoffs and a distinctive configuration of activities. What Is Strategy? — Harvard Business Review
The Bridgespan Group's strategic-planning guidance emphasizes making decisions about impact, priorities, resources and implementation rather than treating the planning process itself as the outcome. How Nonprofits and NGOs Can Get Real Value from Strategic Planning — Bridgespan
BoardSource discusses SWOT as one useful planning tool while describing the sector's movement toward adaptable strategic frameworks and annual plans with clearer metrics and timelines. Nonprofit Strategic Planning — BoardSource