The Power of Painful Tradeoffs in Successful Strategy

Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

The word strategy is often used and often used wrongly. And there is a mentality that I want to address today around strategy, which is that you can have your cake and eat it. As one of our famous British leaders recently said, that is never true when it comes to strategy. Stay tuned. We'll explore why and what you can do instead. The 10K Collective Mastermind Hi, I'm Michael Veazey from Amazing FBA and I'm the leader of the 10k Collective Mastermind, for private label sellers and product brand owners who sell at least half a million dollars a year or more on Amazon. Over the last five years we've had members triple their revenue in one year, grow to eight figures and one member get to a seven- figure exit. Now we're taking it to the next level. I'm excited to introduce the 10K collective Uber mastermind. It's a unique combination of peer group support in person and online and specialist coaching. If you're ready to take your business to seven figures and beyond, just go to TheAmazonmastermind.com. to find out more today. You Can NOT have your cake and eat it! Let's deal with an unpleasant reality. So one of our recent British leaders said, "I'm pro having my cake and pro eating it," which is obviously stupid because the whole point of eating a cake is you no longer have a cake. And just as a lot of deluded things came from that person. This was a delusion as well. What I am going to do is refer to an earlier British leader who said," I can only offer you blood, sweat, and tears." Now that's not quite true either. What I can offer you as a painful trade offs now in exchange for really powerful strategy and great business growth, if you are willing to embrace the fact that you can't have everything. You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. Competitive strategy IS strategy So what am I talking about? Well one of the great books about strategy and competitive strategy specifically, which is most of strategy, I would argue your positioning is kind of to a degree defined by your competition, I would argue. Certainly in a very crowded market space like Amazon it's really almost literally true and pretty much true for everyone because we're all in crowded marketplaces because we all depend on either Google or Amazon or possibly Facebook or TikTok, all of which are crowded, all of which are very full of competition. So let me allay two things to start with. Competitive strategy is strategy. Strategy IS about tradeoffs And secondly Porter, Michael Porter in his book, Competitive Strategy, basically nails the fact that Strategy is about trade offs. If you have A, you don't do B. And if you have B, you don't do A, basically. A time-tested truth Now it's an old book, by the way. Some of the 70s or 80s. Examples are a bit dated, but I believe that the, the insights are very, very time tested. And that's great because time tested truths of business are not easy to find. And particularly in the digital era, things come and go very quickly. Tactics come and go, but strategic things I think are long lived and strategic truths I think are long lived truths as well. So that's the great news. First of all, if you get this stuff, right, you get the principles, right? If you get into the habits of thoughts and action, they can stick and be valuable for decades. That's the great news. The other great thing is if you are willing to make trade offs, there are great Prices at the other side of that, but let's explore why you have to make trade offs. Examples of strategic tradeoffs Premium vs mass market products Let's run a thought experiment. Let's say that you are selling a USB webcam, such as the one I'm using by Logitech. Now Logitech has built a brand, that's why I bought not one, but I had a good experience, so I bought two Logitech cameras. I may buy another one at some point. Equally, there are much cheaper webcams out there. Now, you can, if you want,