Strategy is Survival

Strategy isn’t optional long term.

In the early days of Smart Dolphins, my version of “strategy” was to figure out what people will pay for and go do that. I was exploring, learning, and surviving. But as we grew, it became clear that survival alone wasn’t the goal. Sustainability, focus, and long-term value creation were. That’s when strategy started to mean something for me.

Even today, we sometimes lose the plot. It’s easy to get caught in the fires, the squirrels and the rando of the day. Strategy execution is hard. It often requires doing things that aren’t urgent, obvious, or easy. And so we procrastinate or settle for activity instead of progress. MSPs are especially vulnerable to this. There’s so much noise in our industry: so many “best practices,” so many optimization levers, so much technical debt to manage. Driving efficiency alone can feel like an excellent strategy alone. In some situations, it might be. But I think it’s often a trap.

Michael Porter talks about the “efficiency frontier”—the best possible combination of activities to minimize cost or maximize performance. The problem? Everyone is chasing it. That means operational excellence alone won’t differentiate you. You need to choose to be different.

Choosing to Matter

Strategy is about creating and defending something uniquely valuable. That applies to your market offering, but also to how you show up in that market. For MSPs especially, the danger is defaulting to sameness. Selling the same stack. Saying the same words. Pricing by the same rules.

And here’s the hard part: strategy isn’t just a business concept. I think it starts with inward awareness. It’s about knowing who you are (your strengths, your team’s capabilities, your worldview) and building a business that channels those things into value.

I’ve come to think of good strategy as a kind of Venn diagram: one circle for what your team is naturally great at (and energized by), one for what the market values, and one for what industry trends and data suggest is smart. Where those overlap lies your strategy. And given those diagrams change constantly, strategy is a living thing, not a fixed destination.

Strategy or Chaos

When we’ve had strategic clarity, Smart Dolphins has felt aligned, powerful, and confident. When we haven’t, things have gotten murky. One example: our commitment to pursuing what we call “Unicorn Clients”: ideal fits for who we are and how we work. It sounds obvious. But when sales get slow or a big prospect shows interest, it’s easy to stretch that definition. Before long, you’re chasing new opportunities that don’t fit your model, your pricing, or your people. And now you’re burning energy instead of building.

In my experience, when things get murky in a business it’s usually a strategy problem. If everyone’s rowing hard but in slightly different directions, it’s not a people issue. It’s a clarity issue.

And that clarity is hard to maintain. We do our best to revisit strategy regularly, but like many companies, we tend to get most serious about it during annual planning season. Ideally, strategy would be a living conversation. We’re still working on that.

SMBs Get Strategy Wrong in Predictable Ways

A few patterns I see often in the MSP world:

• Overvaluing revenue, headcount, or other vanity metrics that don’t always connect to sustainability
• Chasing short-term opportunity without a long-term frame
• Confusing operational best practices with strategic uniqueness
• Thinking too big (trying to imitate an enterprise) or too small (failing to see where the world is going)

Strategy is about knowing your lane and playing to your strengths. As a small business, you can’t win on every front. But you can absolutely win in the places that matter most to your clients and your team.

That’s what we’ve tried to do at Smart Dolphins. And when we’ve gotten it right, it hasn’t just helped us grow and it’s helped us last.

What’s this 25/25 stuff about?: 25 YEARS, 25 INSIGHTS – Reflections on Growth, Leadership and Resilience | Smart Dolphins IT Solutions Inc.