This guide is about Change Before Strategy (CBS). It is about sophistication and peak performance for startups. It is very useful to startups and entrepreneurs, but indeed to all private and government institutions supporting startup work, e.g. incubators, accelerators, hubs, technology parks, VC, training and similar.

There can be million reasons why a startup project can fail, but only a handful why it can succeed. This reflects reality of things, since more than 70% of startups fail after a few years from launch. Success of an undertaking (or failure) is not just about the business concept as such, but more importantly about the people behind the business. The majority of people do not do enough. A lot of the startup projects fail because of lack of strategy and value proposition, but also lack of drive of the people behind them.

The key question is: What is driving you or your team to achieve, and is it enough and is it of the right kind? Reason being that deciding what you want to do, formulating a sophisticated strategy and succeeding in your business are a matter of both mind and heart, and are NOT like a mathematical equation

The conventional approach suggests you get started quickly with the startup project and that you learn and adjust while you are working on your project: This is very bad for most projects; it is like saying you learn driving while you are on the super highway at high speed for the first time!!! With prior self-transformation you will be still learning with your startup, but this will be on very different level.

This guide aims essentially at igniting mindsets, i.e. to stimulate and strengthen the drive for success and peak performance, and for the entrepreneur or his team to be in a much better position to develop an extraordinary strategy and to have an exponential success.

This 2 to 6 months self-transformation phase is to help you discover and realize as much as possible of your inherent potential, and the limits you can push, before you decide what you want to do and how you want to do it. You have to have a feel of what makes you tick, i.e. your passion, your values, your strong points, but also your weak points. Basically, you should blossom before you decide what you want to do.

There are some twenty mindsets to embrace and that should be proven and transformed into habits during the self-transformation period. Each mindset is described thoroughly.

An elaborate SELF-ASSESSMENT is included to help you as individual or team identify your weak points and strong points before you start, and hence to identify the kind of mindsets you need to strengthen in you. The assessment covers also essential hard and soft skills.

This guide is very thorough in the WHAT self-transformation is about, and HOW it is done and WHEN. For example, a lot of directions are provided as to how you can practice the mindsets and how to prove them and turn them into habits. It also highlights the many benefits of CBS with visual support.

The effectiveness of the initial self-transformation before strategy approach has been proven extensively by the author in his extensive startup support work, but also by similar approaches adopted by government programs in many countries. It is also proven by very recent research work covering high growth startups

There are immense benefits to gain from the self-transformation process before strategy.

>>> TRAINING: Author / consultant Stephen Sweid provides customized training courses and coaching sessions for the same topic.