Asking insightful, strategic questions could help you build company worth
As we are now in Q4, let’s pick our heads up from the tactical side of our businesses and think about our future euphoric company exit event. To get there, good leaders ask good questions – they want to facilitate strategic level dialog with key members of their team because they know that any threat or opportunity their company faces, won’t generally be seen or addressed by only having tactical level dialog.
Here are a few good strategic questions to be thinking about with your leadership team in Q4:
- What’s our forecast for our 2025 revenue and profit and when looked at over our prior 5 year historical performance, are we showing a consistent upward trend of both? If not, why not?
- Are we making progress this year in building company worth?
- Addressing any customer or vendor concentration challenges?
- Building our customer stickiness?
- Enhancing our sales model to build a more predictable future revenue stream?
- Innovating product, service or capability that makes us unique in the market?
- Strengthening our team and/or company culture?
- Driving operational improvements to increase productivity and efficiencies?
- Building our brand equity with attractive customer segments?
- In preparation for the new year, what logic will underpin our revenue and profit targets?
- What’s our forecasted backlog that we will begin the new year with?
- Will we lose any contracts or customers that we need to factor in?
- Are we targeting specific markets or customers to drive growth?
- Will we be developing sales plans for our top customers (or top customer segments)?
- Are we planning our growth from existing customers or new ones?
- Are we planning our growth from existing products/services or new ones?
- What is our pricing strategy for the new year and what yield will impact our financials?
- In preparation for the new year, what strategic focus should we have in the year ahead?
- What operational improvements do we want to make? Can we become more efficient?
- How might new technologies impact us positively or negatively?
- What organizational structure and/or culture improvements do we want to make?
- What improvements do we want to make to systems or processes to support growth?
- What improvements do we want to make to our sales and marketing model? To our pricing model?
- What dynamics presented themselves in 2025 that could either lead to our company being disrupted by a competitor or that could enable us to be a disrupter of others?
The list could go on here but you get the gist. Strategic leaders constantly are thinking strategically with their team. And yes, then bridging that strategic thinking to action. But for too many, their comfort level is the daily tactical focus and too little on the strategic questions and discussions that will have the most positive impact on building company worth. Use this beginning of Q4 as yet another opportunity for building the strategic thinking muscle at your business and leverage these questions to facilitate a healthy team dialog.
