Success doesn’t happen overnight. Building a successful business over time requires three key strategies: divide and conquer, focus, and continuous improvement.

Overnight success.

Blitz-scaling.

Wunderkind.

Ask the Romans: It doesn’t work. Building something great and lasting takes years — or even decades — of blood, sweat, and tears.

It’s the same for every business. At Yonder, we laid the founding stone exactly 10 years ago and started to develop today’s product 6 years ago. We created a product out of nothing, and this took not just time, but also many twists and turns.

Let’s look at three strategies that have helped me build our company over the last 10 years.

Strategy 1: Divide et Impera

Let’s start with some Roman tactics. Divide et impera — or divide and conquer — is a tactic to separate opponents to take them on one after the other.

The same strategy works in a business. When things are chaotic and you think you can’t get anything done, divide the stuff on your plate into small pieces to conquer at least some of the problems.

This tactic works well when people with different skills mix up multiple topics into a single meeting or email: The IT guy talking about business topics, and business people talking about IT security, for example.

Often, entrepreneurs mix up multiple topics themselves. Trying to negotiate a master agreement with a customer covering software licenses, services, future growth and non-standard hosting takes much longer than negotiating four separate, smaller agreements that are hold together by a framework contract.

Strategy 2: Focus

Dividing problems is one thing, but identifying the important problems is another. All the dividing doesn’t amount to anything if you then focus on the wrong problems. If you focus on side battles instead of the main effort, you will never see the Eternal City finished.

In a growing company, the focus is on sales, customers, and product. It’s also on motivating your team so that they can focus on sales, customers, and product — and that includes firing people who don’t or can’t focus on sales, customers, and product.

However, the focus in a growing company is never on administration, personal power play, or shifting work between the teams.

Strategy 3: Kaizen

Now that you have divided your work into smaller problems and focused on the right problems, you’re done, right?

Not yet.

Working on the focus problems is never finished. Never. Cut the illusion. You can always improve your sales efforts, your customer relations, your product, and your capital efficiency.

Enter Kaizen.

Kaizen is a method for continuous improvement, which was originally invented in Japan after WWII. It aims to remove waste (or “muda”) in small steps, whereby all workers should be involved in finding and implementing improvements. It can uncover untapped optimization potential directly at the base, and it doesn’t cost a lot. Furthermore, it has an element of cultural change, as it involves employees of all levels.

I learned the ropes of Kaizen back in 2011 when I took the job of Business Engineer Ground Services at Swiss International Air Lines. My main task was to improve the ground and airport processes at all the stations the airline was flying to worldwide.

Over a decade later, I have long quit that job that got me involved with Kaizen. I have also long ago quit the world of large corporations to become an entrepreneur. What has stayed is my conviction that the step-by-step improvement approach advocated by Kaizen is a recipe that can be applied to almost any situation in a growing company.