The Principles of Vigilant Leadership: #1 The Landscape Reality Check: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Mar 11, 2025

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re breaking down the first principle of Vigilant Leadership. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

Episode Summary & Player
Show Notes
Strategic Counsel Summary
Transcript

***Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business*: The Principles of Vigilant Leadership: #1 The Landscape Reality Check**

There are many things that can distract even the very best leaders. Those include the lack of prioritization, leaning too far into empathy, the inability to give timely & direct feedback, and the desire to be liked over being respected. In these scenarios, it’s essential to maintain focus and strong strategic oversight. In this episode, we take our 40+ years of combined experience paired with the many leaders we have coached and contextualize what happens, why, and what to do about it. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

What is vigilant leadership?
How to conduct a landscape reality check?
How to avoid “me too” syndrome?
What is the biggest killer of business growth?
How to clearly see your competitive advantages?

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

The Principles of Vigilant Leadership: #1 The Landscape Reality Check
- [0:01] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
- [0:41] What is Vigilant Leadership?
- [1:58] What makes a person a successful vigilant leader in business?
- [3:21] What is a landscape reality check?
- [6:20] How to conduct a landscape reality check?
- [7:57] It’s important to look beyond your industry or vertical
- [9:30] How to look for new ways to to add value in the business?
- [14:07] Looking into the power of your brand to serve your customers
- [18:51] Honing in on your competitive advantages
- [21:53] Complacency is the thief of all business growth
- [23:42] How to set goals in this framework?
- [28:02] The hardest part is taking action and knowing what to do next
- [29:24] Due diligence is your strategic advantage
- [31:01] Don’t fall into “me too” syndrome
- [35:38] Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
- [35:50] Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Linke dIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Anne Candido 0:02
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place in our discussions we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome to the Strategic Counsel podcast. I am Anne Candido and I am April martini, and today we’re going to talk about the first principle of vigilant leadership, and that is the landscape reality check. Now if you’ve listened to us before, you know vigilant leadership is a style of leadership we had hold as being the very best for creating highly effective teams. We’ve talked about that a lot when we have talked about vigilant leadership in the past, though we have talked about being the Art of Leading from afar, so more of how your leadership style is reflected on how you manage your team. Now we’re expanding the concept of vigilant leadership to also have more of a business focus. So in this expanded definition of vigilant leadership, we define it as an elite level of leadership that draws upon a hyper awareness of what moves a business towards success while avoiding common pitfalls that get in the way, all while leading from a place of consistent intentional action. So I’m going to say that one more time, just case you guys didn’t get it okay, because it’s a lot. So we define it as an elite level leadership that draws upon a hyper awareness of what moves a business towards success while avoiding common pitfalls that get in the way, all while leading from a place of consistent intentional action,

April Martini 1:41
yes, and as Anne just said, that’s a lot. So let’s break it down a bit to contextualize what this type of leader is often described as. So someone who’s able to see around corners, someone who anticipates versus just reacting, someone who is intentional with their actions, someone that plans with purpose, someone that easily navigates roadblocks, and someone that manages risk appropriately. So hopefully, you’re starting to at least maybe think of some people in your head or understand contextually how this comes to life. Because, as you can imagine, when you combine the attributes we have regarding what makes one a successful vigilant leader of a team now with this definition of what makes one a successful vigilant leader of a business, you get one very powerful and effective leader. And no, it’s not a unicorn. That’s a question we often get when we bring up this topic. You can probably think, like I just said, of several leaders that model this, and what we want from this episode is that it can become you too.

Anne Candido 2:53
That is right. So over several episodes, they’re not probably gonna be sequentially, so you’ll have to tune in to hear when we’re going to have the next one of the four. Yup. We’re going to break down these principles of being a vigilante leader for your business. And as stated just a minute ago, the first one is the landscape reality check. So let’s jump in. Yep, alright. So let’s first talk about what is a landscape reality check. So the objective of the landscape reality check is to fully understand your external and internal environment, and the operative word here is reality. So this is really to uncover what is currently going on, and doing that, data mining, doing that and being an investigator into really addressing the that’s brutally ugly to what’s working in your business, and really wrapping your mind around this, because what it does is it leads to actionable short term and long term goals with monitoring and metrics to measure progress that are going to directly address what you’re seeing in your landscape. Now, many use what’s commonly called a SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and threads, to address this, but we personally think, and we can say this through 40 plus years of experience working all sides of the business, that is woefully incomplete because it doesn’t do a sufficient job of looking through all the lenses that impact your business. So it’s important to get really specific that you can focus on the right actions and make sure that you’re not providing just generalized statements for what these things stand for. You’re actually having specific actions, and you know what you’re going to focus on, and you know what you’re going to go

April Martini 4:39
do, yeah. So the first thing you guys probably heard me chuckle around the word reality, because I think I’ll chuckle too well, we what we want to make sure of here, right, is that it is a very real picture of what is going on, like Anne said, both externally and internally, and that that is an objective. Look and that it’s not tainted by all the things, emotions, feelings, all of that kind of stuff, right? And then the piece Anne said about the SWOT analysis, just to go a little deeper there, the thing that I don’t love historically about those is it just becomes a list on a page. And so you kind of put things in quadrants, and you make a list, and it can be a good starting point for this exercise to kind of get some stuff out of your head. But I think the point Anne made about it not doing a sufficient job of looking through all the lenses that impact the business is that it just inherently breaks things apart in a somewhat unnatural way that then doesn’t allow you to get to the reality of the situation at a very deep and holistic perspective or level.

Anne Candido 5:46
Yeah. I mean, it’s about being honest, really, and and that takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of fortitude and some some vulnerability, to really take a look and say, Hey, um, you know, this is working. This is not working so well, and we’re going to put some focus into this. And again, it’s data, guys. It’s really about data, and really taking that objective lens of what is going to move the business forward versus what is going to get the business or keep the business stuck right? Yep. So when we conduct a landscape reality check, we do it through the construct of a pyramid. So April and I are going to walk you through each stage of this pyramid. So at the very bottom is your industry or category, and it’s the broadest lens that you look through. And this is a very common lens. When everybody’s doing competitive analysis, or they’re looking for strategies for growth, or they’re looking at what headwinds that they might face. So what’s going on in the industry that might create a headwind? A lot of times, and most recent, we’ve had issues with transportation and in those sorts of things. So we’re kind of looking at the industry as a whole and trying to see what we need to keep an eye on so what’s going to impact our businesses day to day, and really taking more of the proactive approach to maybe even anticipating, to some extent, without really having it like be a anchor on your business. So Well, a lot of times, we’ll do competitive analysis so that we are prepared to react. But what we want you to do is we want you to look through this lens of of your industry as like, who, what are the opportunities here? What am I really looking by? How is my industry going to shift, and where is potential white space? Where is things that the innovation may take us? Like, whatever your lens for your businesses is the lens we want you to look through your industry and category with,

April Martini 7:45
yeah, and the piece that I’ll add here is it’s really important to go just beyond your specific industry and look at the category as a whole. So for example, we work with a construction company. We’re not just talking about the businesses that they directly compete with, but there’s other aspects of that industry at the category level that have impact. So, you know, the providers of the materials, their subcontractors, right? It’s the whole landscape in and of itself. I think what happens sometimes as people get too granular and they only look at their direct competitors within the industry, instead of taking the whole thing and looking across. Because I think, to Anne’s point, this is where I think you can get really proactive, because naturally, then you’re starting to look more at the strategic level the industry that you are in, versus just the day to day of who you may compete with and who is in your direct purview all the time.

Anne Candido 8:48
I think that’s a really good point, because you want to look at everything that is going to somehow, or could somehow impact your business, right? Yes, I mean, there has been a shortage of workers when we’re talking about from the construction industry as an example, right? Or skilled workers, so that can definitely impact the way that you’re going to do business. But then there’s also new opportunities, or areas of continued expansion, so that could be potential new revenue in a different area that you may not be currently working in. But you might want to start to build the capability to work in, right? So it’s sucking it from both sides of that coin, Exactly, yep. So the next level up is your function or your field. So here you’re looking for new trends that impact how you add value to the business, for the example, and this is usually what helps to kind of internalize this for people, is the use of AI in marketing and sales. So everybody’s kind of like really looking at what, how does AI going to work in my business, and how can we use that effectively and efficiently as an example, or the rise of digitally native selling. So some businesses don’t even get off a digital platform. They don’t. Have any brick and mortar, they don’t have a retail so this has become a new level of expertise for a lot of people and a lot of other businesses, if you think of like HubSpot and Shopify and all these other systems and services that are needed in order to make these businesses be productive, businesses all digitally native, or the use of virtual agents and apps for doing just about everything, from receptionists to call centers to HR. So it’s about practically looking at what is working again and not working, and really thinking about how to shift accordingly, and seeing what new functionality, what new capability is out there within the context of your field or your function, and being able to pull that in to drive incremental value for the business, whether it’s through adding productivity, driving efficiency, being able to generate more leads, being able to close more leads, whatever those business goals are, you look through the lens of your function and field to see how you’re going to be able to contribute to

April Martini 10:57
that. Yeah, and this is a big one, as many of you probably remember we did a 10 part series on the creative industry and where it was going last year, and I think this is one that got missed, and it’s still being missed by a lot of agency folks, because the model, unfortunately, of charging 10s of 1000s of dollars For some of the stuff in the creative services industry is being replaced by some of these digital tools that Anne mentioned, as well as things like being able to get a logo created for 50 bucks on Fiverr, or putting Canva in the hands of everybody, and thinking that everybody can be a creative and as a creative myself, it’s one of the things that really does make me inherently sad, but I think it contextualizes why this function and field portion of the landscape reality check is so important. Because what agencies should have been looking for is as these tools, digital tools, start to encroach on the territory of what we do and change what we can charge and all of those things. What are we going to either reposition ourselves to be from a value perspective with clients, or learn new things, or use these tools to make us better and more efficient to thereby increase the margins, for example? So just kind of another example that came up as Anne was talking but really, I think a lot of the function and field components these days are digitally oriented somehow. So really making sure that you’re taking a look at that and then getting really clear on what it means for you and your business. Well, I

Anne Candido 12:36
think that’s a super important point, because what it really marks is this is a really great opportunity. When we said your landscape reality check is like externally, internally is to look internally to see where growth and capability need to be developed, yep, and how they need to be developed for your shifting landscape in order to continue to stay relevant. Yeah, so so much we spend like stuck in our old ways of doing things, and we think the old or the traditional ways of doing things, or the better ways of doing things, but and then what happens is that the world passes us by, and we’re still stuck in the old way of doing things, and all of a sudden we’re not fast enough, we’re not nimble enough, we’re not being able to keep up with everybody else. And so then what happens is that we start to we start to fall behind. So that doesn’t mean we’re saying you have to adopt everything, but it what it does mean is that you’re looking and you’re making that assessment, and you’re trying to decide where you’re going to have gaps, where you have opportunities to be able to grow and evolve with the chanting lace changing landscape. Because keep in mind, the landscape is always changing, sometimes faster for others, but you have to maintain your vigilance over the way that your people in a way that your skills and your capability and the way that you’re structured, and whether or not that’s conducive to being able to serve the new way and the new formats that people are doing business, alright? So the next one in the next level of the pyramid is your customers or clients or consumers, however you’re defining them. So this starts getting into the power of your brand. And you know it was going to come up at some point you guys, you do know us, hopefully, yeah, it was going to play a part here. Hopefully you guys are like, Okay, once the brand come up, we know it’s coming. We know it’s coming. Well, there you go. We are The suspense is over. It’s about the power of the brand and how well it’s serving your target customer. Just going to use customer as a proxy, just to keep this language simple. So to continually grow and maintain customers, you need to continue be evaluating if you’re meeting your customers needs in a way that’s adding disproportionate value versus competition. So just like on the last point where we said you need to make sure that your your internal folks and your internal capabilities, and you’re recognizing the need for growth and to building capability there and continuing to learn and evolve, you’re doing it in person. Of being able to continue to add disproportionate value to your customers, because when we add disproportionate value, that’s how we win. And so we need to maintain that competitive advantage, that competitive edge, so that we can make sure that again, our businesses continue to stay relevant, they continue to grow, or continue to serve the relationships that we need to serve, and we are continuing to evolve with the tensions that our customers and our clients might be facing now. So you want to ask yourself, have my customers needs changed? What are their current tensions? Like I just said, What can I improve to serve them even better? This has to be an ongoing dialog that you’re having with your team and your customers and your clients, frankly, to continue to check in and make sure that it’s an intentional part of how you’re building your strategy.

April Martini 15:47
Yeah, and this is one where the pitfall I see is not bringing that customer into the room and or making sure that the perspective is kind of that external in versus what you are doing internally out. Because what we have seen happen is this is where another place where you can stagnate or become irrelevant or not keep up with where things need to be. If internally, we’re getting really excited about what we do or believing that we’re doing great, and we don’t need to change anything, and the customer’s super happy, right? Those are places where we can get caught up. So making sure this is another external, internal tension point that can be really good, because on the other side where it works is, if you’re asking these questions of the customers, you have an ongoing dialog with them, and then you’re bringing that in and again, using the lens of the brand to say, Okay, and what are we gonna what are we able to do about that? Or what are they really saying? Or back to, what do we uniquely stand for? Or how do we have to change in order to keep that relationship healthy, or have it mature, or grow further, or even bring new customers into the fold. All of those are the right types of questions. But again, you have to make sure that you have that customer voice to balance out internally what you’re saying, because we spend so much time in our business that if we don’t go outside, this is one of the places where the customer can get lost.

Anne Candido 17:18
Yeah, I mean, I think I was summed that up, but like, we tend to fall in love with what we sell, yeah, yep, right, and we think it’s the best thing ever that why wouldn’t somebody want what we have? And we forget that we need to match it up with a tension or a problem or an opportunity that our customers are facing in order to be able to sell it. Right? So the value of what we’re selling is only the value of what somebody else is willing to buy it for. And so the hard work becomes being able to position what you’re selling in a way that has the value that elicits that desire to buy, the desire to continue to buy, whether that’s a product or a service. And we call it the emotional integrity, because a lot of times what you’re selling, you’re not selling the actual thing you’re making. You’re selling what that thing is going to do for somebody’s life. And when you can tap into that, you can create disproportionate and extremely tangible value that allows you to come out on higher prices. It allows you to gain loyalty, it allows you to expand allows you to get more customers. So that’s really the secret of being able to tap into this. But if you’re losing touch, and you’re getting to what we call fat and happy with how the numbers are looking today, just realize that things are moving very, very quickly, and you have to continue to evolve, and you do that by listening to who your what your customers are saying. Yeah, we don’t want to end up talking to ourselves, yeah, which happens a lot, actually. So alright, so then the last and the very pinnacle of the pyramid is your business. And April had alluded to this, but this is about honing in on your competitive advantage and your vulnerabilities. But unlike a SWOT analysis that approaches this from the inside out, as April suggested, we want you to approach it from the outside in, so think through the perspective of your competition. This is where it gets really interesting, because some things that we think are weaknesses are actually competitive advantages that we can leverage and we can then exploit. So for example, as April was talking about one of our construction clients early on, and this actually is very, frankly, a conversation we have with a lot of our clients who are more locally oriented. They always, for some reason, see that as a disadvantage, because they look at their competition, right? And they see, oh, these guys are bigger. They’re covering more area there, whatever that that that expansive of scale looks like to them. But if you just flip the coin a little bit and you look at it from the the perspective of of who that competition is, they’re looking at these client or these, um, these competitors, and they’re saying, Oh, well. These guys are able to be more nimble. They have a really strong reputation in this area. They’re able to customize whereas, opposed to us, we have to do more mass offerings, or it’s more of a machine. So you need to think about like it from the other side to really, truly appreciate what your competitive advantage is and how you’re disproportionately adding value. That doesn’t mean that you stay there forever, but it does become a really key selling point to be able to leverage and to continue to get more business and to be able to then set some goals against.

April Martini 20:33
Yeah, and you know, at the beginning, back to the reality check and my comment about things being objective, this is a really important place for that. So like Anne said, you know, you don’t, you don’t stay where you are. You don’t. You know that, like all those sort of watch outs we had before, the fat and happy content or, you know, all of those types of things. But this is one where I think you can be really proactive and intentional and smart, quite frankly, at the same time, in order to anticipate and then move before everybody else does. Because the other thing that occurred to me, and as you were talking is that what you don’t want to do is end up in a me too, situation where you’re jumping on the bandwagon either of what your competitors are doing or of something the customer asked for that somebody else is already providing. Right? You want to be in the driver’s seat and be able to know yourself really well, but also make decisions with strategic change in mind, instead of sitting back and or some of the other things we said about kind of resting where you are and then being too late to get where you need to go.

Anne Candido 21:58
Yeah, I think complacency, there you go. I was like, what is that

April Martini 22:01
word that’s been trying to think of complacency. Do

Anne Candido 22:05
you remember so dreamwork, April, we do see a singular brain. So I had the word already prime. When you

April Martini 22:10
started talking, you’re like, well, she just stopped talking. So I can say complacency. That’s what she’s looking for right now.

Anne Candido 22:18
But that is, I mean that that is like a thief of all business growth. Yeah, is complacency because, and we hear it a lot, where it’s like, oh, we’re doing just fine. We’re doing just fine, until you’re not doing fine, because you’re not keeping your eye on the landscape and understanding, internally and externally, how things are shifting and how you’re going to evolve, to shift. And then a lot of times you get behind the eight ball and it’s too late. Now, this isn’t meant to drive paranoia. It’s not meant to cause people to get highly distracted by everything that’s going on, and we’re going to talk about that in a second, but it is meant to be vigilant, which is the point of this. It’s vigilant leadership. So you’re going to identify those areas that you want to keep an eye on, and you maintain vigil and see over those this is not everything, but the soon as you get complacent, I mean, you get little sloppy, you, I mean, you, it just lots of things just happen that it doesn’t benefit the business as a whole. So I think that’s the point that I really wanted to drive home based on what you were saying. So that’s the pyramid. So again, at the bottom is the industry or the category, goes up to your function or your field, and then your customers or clients or consumers, and then your business. Alright, so then the next part about vigilant leadership in the context of your landscape. Reality check that I’m going to talk about is setting goals. So you knew we’re going to get to this one too, because, you know, we’re big on goals and we’re big on accountability. So once you have your full analysis, you now have the data and insights to set your short term and long term goals. So try setting these and putting some milestones for measuring progress against them. And it’s really important that they’re specific as possible, because that will help you really be able to diagnose if things are working or not. Again, the SWOT analysis tends to try to leave things very, very general, and so the KPIs are specific enough to know what’s working or what’s not working. So you want to dig down deep enough so that you understand you have those those levers that you know if you’re increasing them or decreasing them, that you are significantly shifting the business, and then what the ensuing results are from those so in later episodes, we’re going to talk about how to action these goals. So stay tuned for that. But just to kind of give you some context of what this could look like. So for example, if you’re going through your landscape reality check and you determine that you need more rapid innovation that maybe your competition, or the industry in general, is is really innovating at a much faster level than you are, okay. So you say that that is an element of vigilance that you want to really keep an eye on. You might decide, okay, we need more of an R and D effort against this as one way of being able to solve for this could be a gazillion different ways. But just for simplicity. You need an R and D effort, and you really need this so that you can establish a pace of innovation that’s going to allow you to keep up or even overcome what your competition is doing or what the industry is doing. And you you know that it’s also going to be white space for you, it’s going to generate some incremental revenue. So you might, when you’re setting up a goal, you might say, Hey, okay, in three months, we want to be able to establish a couple of new, say, two to three new innovation ideas. So backing that up, we’re going to start our test and learn in the next couple of weeks, and then we’re going to progress to that, having those, those three ideas, like, a couple weeks later, and then we’re going to analyze those ideas, and then we’re going to choose one over some period of time, call it like six months, that we’re going to put in the market. So you’re just basically kind of drafting out some milestones and some some metrics of like progress, so you could kind of get in your head. How long is this going to take? What does the potential process look like? Because when you start to build it out, you’re going to start figuring out, then, do I have the capability when you’re doing internally? Do I have the capability? Do I have the people? Do I have the skills? Do I have what I needed? The resources, other resources, money, whatever that is, in order to be able to really make this come to life? We’re going to talk about that, what must be true plan in later episodes, but you’re just starting to kind of like draft it out and giving yourself a straw man structure, if you will, yeah. And

April Martini 26:27
this is a place where the rubber really starts to meet the road, and people get nervous about actually putting this stuff down on paper, yeah, because it comes real, because it becomes real, right? And I think one part about the specificity that Anne just mentioned is it can take some of the pressure off, but it also can make it more tangible. And so it can be a little bit easier to digest when it feels like, oh yeah, we could really make this happen. And then the other piece is, in addition to setting goals, you know, we’re really big on testing and learning, and I’m not saying that as a cop out, and I’m not saying that as a well, we’ll just put it down on paper, and then if we test and learn and it doesn’t work, then we’re good. We can just check the box that we did it. That’s not what I mean. But what I do mean is that when you put these things down on paper and you start to contextualize what it looks like it’s not necessarily set in stone, but it does help you start to see the possibilities. But that doesn’t mean you have to get stuck in our successes tied to making this quote, unquote, work, because this is one of our goals. There’s a lot of different ways to achieve goals, and there’s a lot of learning that happens along the way. This just is a place where you’ve done enough informed thinking, evaluation and analysis to be able to put something down that makes sense for the business. So that’s just the other piece I think is important here to note, because we do see nerves around like I’m going to put this down, and now what am I committing to? Because now it’s on quote, unquote paper. Paper, I

Anne Candido 28:07
know is there’s something about putting it on paper that all of a sudden the anxiety starts to rise. But I think that’s a really good point. The thing you guys that we’re trying to really motivate you towards is action. So the hardest, the hardest part, a lot of times, is taking the first step and trying to figure out what to go do. This is all starting to set up an area of focus that then drives clarity about what to go do, so that in a lot of circumstances, you’re not just thinking short term, that you’re also thinking long term. And so then if something comes up that disrupts your landscape, and you have to address it. You can address it within the context of what you’re already focused on, both from a short term and long term, and make a rational decision, an objective decision about where that fits in. So it’s really important to just to kind of start to get the lay of the land about what’s important for your business. So you can start making those strategic decisions well,

April Martini 29:00
and it keeps you from doing that, like, knee jerk me to shoot. We’re behind the eight ball, and now we better do something. And then I feel like nine times out of 10 that fails, versus here we are being proactive to create the action that is smart, that then will lead to the ability to do the next thing we need to when something comes up. Yeah.

Anne Candido 29:17
I mean, that’s exactly it. And that was like the last point I wanted to round up with too, which is the due diligence helps businesses really be able to avoid common mistakes when it comes to business health. And these are ones that we’ve experienced personally. Is ones that we’ve coached our clients through. This is ones we’ve seen as we’ve done countless competitive analysis and landscape analysis and marketing analysis. So this is pulling from a bunch of different sources, and this is so this is a pretty complete list, but you’re probably like, I have more on top of that from my business standpoint. So I’m sure there’s ones that are very specialized for your business too, that you can add to this list. But the first one is what April said, is the knee jerking overreaction that distracts the entire team and pulls them from higher price. Already work. I always called it, there is a mouse in my kitchen syndrome. So from even from a PNG standpoint, remember, we’re talking about billion dollar businesses, and our competition, who has, like, you know, a 5% marking share would do something, and we’d be like, Oh my god, now, what do we go do? And I mean, we’re scrambling and trying to figure out what a competitive response is going to be and what’s going to do to our business. And I’m just like, it’s 5% of our business or 5% market share. Why are we even, like, investing this immediate attention to I mean, yes, we does not ignore it, but are we really going to pull everybody from everything that they’re doing for like, weeks at a time in order to address this so you’re able then, like I said, to take these things that are disrupting your landscape and really assess them from a strategic standpoint, to decide, all right, is this? How important is this? Is it worth taking people off this work in order to go address this or not? So it’s a really important concept and context to apply to all these like little distractions that kind of come into your ecosystem. The other one that April mentioned and is right on is the ME TOO syndrome. So that’s when you just follow what everybody else is doing. If so and so is doing it, that must be what everybody is doing now. So I’m going to go do it, and I’m just going to follow along without really thinking about if it’s the best for my business. Is it a sustainable thing that the industry and the category is going to adopt, or is this kind of like an in and out kind of thing a trend. So you really need to think about if, Hey, is it make sense for me to follow or not? Or am I going to have a wait and see? Kind of approach? Again, you can really integrate this into your your plan here, so that you can maintain the right vigilance over it. The other one is thinking too short term. So it’s all about fighting fires and reacting everything that’s going on the business without putting sufficient effort on what the business needs for long term credits growth. This is a thinking in and on your business that you hear us talk all the time. So when you’re very focused on, I gotta get the work done. It’s just this, this thing, you know, we’re looking towards the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of the month, and then all of a sudden we look out a year or two, and we came and project any kind of viable future for the business. So don’t get stuck in the the short term in a way that makes you lose sight of what the long term potential is. We talked about this one about getting stale or letting the world pass you by. Businesses need to continue to refresh and stay relevant, and that’s how you enjoy systemic growth. You can’t just sit and can’t get complacent and expect that your customers are just going to stay with you, because they have for, you know, decades or even shorter time, even for a year or a month, customers are going to go to whoever’s going to serve them the best. So just be prepared for that, and then being reactive versus proactive, which you’ve heard come up in a lot of these points. So it’s, it’s hard to get out in front of what is coming if you aren’t in the touch. So you would need to be keeping that vigilance on the landscape so that you can be more proactive and how you’re going to, as April said, be in control or pilot or drive, what the business is going to go do, and dare we say, lead the category or the industry, and what you’re going to go do, even if you’re the small guys, believe me, we have a gazillion stories about how big brands have been disrupted by smaller brands because they are doing exactly what we’re saying here. Okay, so that is like our big heavy hitters for things to watch out for when you were really going through this landscape. Reality Check, April, anything to add there? Well,

April Martini 33:26
I mean, I think the thing I would say here is use this list as your kind of like gatekeeping. And what I mean by that is when stuff on this list starts to happen or come up or whatever, use it as a reason not to be reactive, but to stay in the lane of being proactive. I mean, I will speak from experience that working at so many agencies and having more creatively minded, shall we say than business grounded conversations. In a lot of cases, this is where we would get ourselves into trouble, and one of the things we always used to talk about was chasing the shiny object, right? Just as one example. But when you start operating more from this proactive space, like Anne said, it allows you to make sure that you’re staying on task and you’re making the right decisions, instead of doing the more reactive behaviors. And that’s where I think you get yourself into trouble.

Anne Candido 34:32
Yeah, and that’s going to be the basis for how we’re going to construct the rest of the Vigilant leadership episode. You’re going to see them all build on each other and help you to get to an actionable plan that you can then deploy and then you can drive against that’s going to help you maintain that vigil and see and that it’s going to help you make the right to strategic decisions for your business. Exactly. Amen, all right. Just to sum up. You guys heard today, as you said, this is all about number one, the landscape reality check. And what we talked about was that you need the landscape reality check, with the operative word being reality. So I laughed like a SWOT analysis. So have you heard anything you hear that you’re going to conduct the landscape reality check through the construct of a pyramid? We talked about the industry category being at the bottom, then followed by your function and field, followed by your customers, followed by the business. Then you set short term and long term goals, and then be careful of some of the common mistakes when it comes to business health. And with that, we encourage you to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put into practice. Maybe try this landscape reality check and see how it goes for you. And remember, Strategic Counsel is only effective you put it into action.

April Martini 35:49
Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to Follow or Subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform!