Beyond Tactics: The Power of Strategic Thinking
Strategic Mindset…this is where we get lost. You are in your weekly team meeting, and everyone is excited and throwing about ideas on all the opportunities the hotel may have. You are so focused on the tools and techniques that no one seemed to have a clear sense of what was going on. You find yourself drowning in a sea of tactics but adrift without a clear destination. Remember, now you have a mission statement so you can use this as your North Star to keep your meetings focused but you first need to learn the difference between being tactical and being strategic. To do that, you need to first know the difference between these two words. For that, I lean into Google Gemini:
Tactic: a planned action or series of actions designed to achieve a specific goal, or a maneuver used to accomplish a particular objective. Some examples include the following:
Military Tactics: Techniques used in combat, such as flanking maneuvers or ambushes
Business Tactics: Methods employed to increase sales, improve market share, or outmaneuver competitors.
Sports Tactics: Maneuvers used by athletes or teams to outplay their opponents, such as changing formation or using specific plays.
Strategic: A strategy is a long-term plan or course of action designed to achieve a particular goal. It is a broader, more overarching concept, that is the overall framework or plan that guides your actions. Let’s look at some examples again from a strategic perspective:
Military Strategy: A nation’s plan for waging a war, including its objectives, resource allocation, and deployment of forces.
Business Strategy: A company’s overall plan for achieving success, including its mission, vision, goals, and competitive advantage.
Sports Strategy: A team’s overall approach to playing a sport, including its game plan, formations, and player roles.
In the commercial strategy space, a tactic would be the steps of an action plan. The how behind accomplishing the goal. For instance, changing a rate or preparing a report. It can also look like making sales calls to previous clients or training your front office on upsell platforms. In the digital space, it is about launching the ad. Strategic mindset means designing plans to implement that directly address the mission statement you have set. For instance, if your mission is to grow ADR, then you are looking at segmentation mix, market positioning, or even refining the overall guest experience. If your mission is to reduce OTA contribution, then you are designing a new marketing plan that targets loyalty and retail, or diversifying group revenue streams to attract more group revenue.
Let’s shift into a strategic mindset. Look at your new mission statement and then take a step back from it. Ask yourself “what is necessary to accomplish this goal?” Using one of the examples above, your mission statement is to grow ADR. You know you need to do this by growing retail contribution. Now you can put on your strategic hat and think through all the next steps to accomplish this goal. You want to start first with gathering data, always make data-based decisions. Here are a few questions we can consider in this example:
What are our peak nights?
On peak nights, what is our mix of business? Our competitors mix of business?
Which segment has the largest contribution on sold out nights, why?
What are our target group ceilings?
Where are we spending marketing dollars?
On our marketing spend, what is our true ROI and is that increasing our contribution in that segment?
What is the largest segment contribution in the market?
What do our service scores look like for the brand and online?
What is our competitiveness in the market?
Once we start to answer these questions, we will quickly see a picture coming into view. Each answer to each of these questions is a possible strategic direction. If our peak nights are Tuesday and Wednesday night and group and discount have the highest contribution mix on those nights, but our competition has a 10% lift in retail/loyalty then we need to identify what to stop taking to save space for retail. Are we not getting retail business because our online presence and service scores are not good? What is a plan we can put around improving your scores? These are all strategies to complete our mission statement to improve ADR. Once we have these strategies in place, we can shift back into tactical to implement them.
To effectively navigate the complexities of achieving goals, it is crucial to maintain a strategic perspective. By understanding the difference between tactics and strategy, we can avoid getting lost in the details and ensure our actions are aligned with our overarching objectives. Remember, a well-crafted strategy provides the roadmap, while tactics are the vehicles that carry us towards our desired destination.
