Shannon Susko - 3HAG WAY: The Strategic Execution System that ensures your strategy is not a Wild-Ass-Guess!

Copyright 2018 Shannon Byrne Susko

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938871

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-947368-79-8

ISBN eBook: 978-1-947368-80-4

Cover Design: Zeljka Kojic

Interior Design: Ghislain Viau

In memory of my Dad, E. Michael Byrne, who always told me when growing my first company to make sure I take time

to stop and smell the flowers. The 3HAG WAY sure helped me to do this! Thanks Dad! Miss you every day!

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Foreword

by Kaihan Krippendorff

H ere is the problem with most business books: they focus on the easy part. They pick up their stories of Apple or Google or Starbucks after luck has struck. In their hindsight retelling

of how Steve Jobs discovered design, how Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out page-ranking, or how Howard Schultz realized Americans wanted to drink coffee, they focus on what happens after the birth of insights that propel breakthrough growth.

In their haste to get to the entertaining parts of their stories, they gloss over the long, agonizing slog these founders had to endure to get there.

In 1970, a team of college students from the University of Pennsylvania decided to take a leap. As a class assignment, they had written a business plan for a retail store that would sell anything college students wanted but couldnt find at shops near campus. Today Urban Outfit-ters is one of the most successful retail chains in the US: with $3.5 billion in revenue, the retailer consistently grows faster and produces higher profit margins than its peers. Competitors struggle to match their growth strategy, which relies on hard-to-copy factors like culture, uncommon hiring practices, and entrepreneurial processes that run counter to most retailers affinities for efficiency and simplicity.

But Urban Outfitters struggled until around 1980, when, after a decade of trial and error, it hit upon its formula for success. After ten years of pushing for 1015 percent growth each year, suddenly the company started growing at 4050 percent annually.

In 1974, four years after the Urban Outfitters team took their entrepreneurial leap, two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, decided to start building computers. Today their company, Apple, is the most valuable and one of the most admired beacons of innovation, with over $230 billion in revenue. But the story typically told about Apple overlooks that the company averaged just 3 percent growth until 2003, when something magical happened. The company suddenly accelerated, clocking nearly 40 percent annual growth for the next ten years.

Most companies endure long periods of tepid growth before they stumble upon a formula that works. Urban Outfitters took a decade to get to its scaling point; Apple took three decades.

What happens during those long slogs in search of growth? A lot of wild-ass guesses, misses, and learning.

After returning from a trip to Italy in 1984, Schultz convinced his employer, Starbucks, to test out a new coffeehouse concept. A few years later he acquired the company, and he made tons of mistakes. Customers complained about menus written in Italian, and about having to listen to opera music. Baristas hated the bow ties. Stores had no chairs. But he learned along the way, and once he figured out his strategic formula, Starbucks revenue and store-count suddenly surged.

The slog toward growth can be demoralizing. After just a year of trying to build Google, Page was ready to give up his control of the company in his search for growth. He offered to sell the company to Excite for $1 million and work there for seven months before returning to Stanford in the fall. When Excite turned him down, he dropped the price to $700,000. Luckily for him, Excites leadership still declined, which forced Page and Brin to embark on their search for growth on their own.

In 3HAG Way , Shannon Susko offers a step-by-step process to shorten the time it takes to reach your scaling point. Her methodology shows you how to stop guessing, and thereby find a shortcut to growth.

Ive known Shannon for years. I was drawn to her, as many are, by her uncommon accomplishments: She has launched two companies and scaled four businesses with two very successful exitsthe second exit exponentially better than the first. These exits were less than six years apart, and the time between the founding and selling of her second company was just three years and three months. In 2011 Shannon was named Dealmaker of the Year by BIV/ACG in Vancouver for her sale of Subservo, and the deal itself was recognized as one of the top three mid-market deals on Wall Street that year.

That track record alone puts Shannon in the top echelon of founders that entrepreneurs should want to learn from. But what makes her truly stand out is her talent for synthesizing knowledge into tools you can immediately apply. While many successful business leaders base their knowledge on their experience, Shannon also devises her methodologies by standing on the shoulders of giants. She reads more business books, attends more conferences, and draws knowledge from more business thinkers than anyone I know. She leverages what works from leading business experts like Jim Collins, Michael Porter, Rene Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim, Verne Harnish, Geoffrey Moore, Alexander Osterwalder, and even my own work, refines it through application in her businesses, and infuses her personal experience. She doesnt try to reinvent the wheel, nor does she burden you with unproven fluff.