When we didn’t have strategy — nobody asked for it, and nobody missed it
until it was too late
Thanks for continuing to read these letters.
When Tørn was growing fast, everything looked right from the outside.
We had a concept customers loved — close to 120 MNOK in sales, > 50000 tons of waste saved, solid traction, investors, attention.
But underneath, something crucial was missing — and none of us noticed until it was too late.
We didn’t have strategic clarity.
I know that sounds abstract. Clarity is a vague word, and strategy is probably one of the most misused and destroyed words in business.
But here’s what it really means in practice — and why I now see the same pattern in almost every company I work with.
Momentum without alignment
In the beginning of Tørn, I did many things right.
Before jumping into a solution, I first mapped the problem — and sold the solution before building it.
The problem was real, relevant, and big: professional retailers of building materials were sitting on random surplus goods that were costly to sell and interfered with normal sales.
Our idea — to collect ( digital information about) these goods from many retailers and sell them in one place online — made complete sense.
It worked. The concept was innovative and the need obvious, so momentum built quickly.
But once the first traction came, cracks started to show.
New problems appeared faster than we could solve them, and we solved them as we ran.
That was the moment we should have stopped, looked up, and built shared strategic clarity — about what we were truly building, what to double down on, and what to stop doing.
Instead, we kept running.
We solved user problems with investor money.
And because we could always raise a bit more (Those were the good times!), we didn’t notice that we were drifting.
How lack of clarity feels inside
I ran a few strategy sessions in 2022 and 2023 — no one had asked me to.
At one point, someone high up in the ranks said:
“Why do you need a strategy? Aren’t you just supposed to sell and that’s it?”
I remember feeling taken aback.
How could someone think strategy was useless?
But in hindsight, we were both partly right.
We had a “strategy,” but it didn’t tell us exactly what value we were delivering, what was unique, what to prioritize, what not to do, and why.
It wasn’t sharp enough to align the team.
As more people joined, everyone started doing their own version of what they thought mattered most.
And when that happens, you can feel it everywhere.
- Every small decision becomes an internal debate.
- Discussions tend to go in circles.
- Execution feels shaky.
- Everyone feels entitled to throw in new ideas all the time
- People spend time on things that don’t really move the needle, simply because there’s no shared compass.
It’s not chaos — it’s drift.
And drift is dangerous because it feels productive while slowly unravelling what you’ve built — or worse, what you never really built in the first place.
The pattern I see everywhere
I see this everywhere now.
Founders who’ve reached early traction and some funding hit a wall where growth starts to feel random. The red numbers increase or stay unchanged. The bank account is depleting fast and pressure starts to build.
They blame the market, the customers, or a missing hire:
“We need to have a pricing campaign.” (Maybe we’re too expensive?)
“We just need to develop this extra feature in our product.”
“We just need a content writer.”
“We need a growth marketer.”
“We need a KAM.”
And to do that, we need more money.
So the founder spends all her time chasing investors.
You don’t miss what you’ve never experienced — and most founders have never truly experienced clarity.
What strategy actually is
Strategy isn’t a vision (“We want to make air cleaner for everyone”).
It’s not a goal (“We’ll have 20 % of the x market by next year”).
It’s not a roadmap, to-do list or a 30-slide deck.
At its best, strategy is one sentence — so powerful that it can guide every operative decision for the next 12 months,
and clear enough that everyone on the team can see their role in it.
What I do now
This is now the first thing I work on with every client.
When I say we’ll start with strategy, they’re often sceptical — and I understand why.
The word has been diluted to the point of meaning nothing.
But the teams who trust the process see a visible shift: sharper focus, faster decisions, and renewed energy.
The discussions stop circling.
People start pulling in the same direction.
There are few things I’ve been more convinced of in my career.
How to find that one guiding sentence — the core of your company — will be the topic of my next post.
Anjali
In case you missed it
🧭 What happened after Tørn — and what I’m doing now → [Read here]
From earlier writing
📄 Alle snakker om PMF – men få vet hva det egentlig betyr → [Publisert i Shifter]
📄 Kapital er både knapp og farlig: den forsterker svakheter når klarhet mangler → Publisert på Substack