Taking Control With Strategic Planning

Taking control of your company strategy acknowledges your present situation while planning for the future. This strategic approach involves taking a detailed look at where your company stands and at the environment surrounding you. While it may be tempting to continue with a day-to-day routine that is working well enough, this mindset leaves you vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of your industry. Instead of getting washed about in the tides, ride the wave of success by planning for the future.

In our previous article, we discussed some of the methods and models for strategic planning. Now, we will review the more significant implications of a sound business strategy. Let us start by looking at some signs that you need to update your business’s approach.

When to Update Your Business’s Strategy

There should never be a time when you are not updating your business’s strategic plan. Change is a consistent factor in the corporate world. Current events will shape your industry, and new technology will unlock greater capabilities within and outside your company. Avoid falling behind by setting regular meetings with your team to revise your strategy. Ideally, these should happen monthly with your business’s major stakeholders.

Monthly meetings facilitate minor changes. The frequency of these meetings encourages slow, gradual change rather than major periodic overhauls. Upending your staff’s routine with significant changes can affect your company’s morale and reduce productivity. Instead, create a culture of learning by introducing slow changes early on. This gets them used to slow, constant shifts and makes it easier to adapt over time.

After you have set your monthly strategy review meetings, choose a date for a yearly planning review. In this meeting, look over all the data from the smaller changes you have made and how they impacted your business. Then, you will use this data to structure your approaches and goals for the following year. These will likely change from the original plan to some degree, but you need to choose a logical direction for your business using all available information.

The Ingredients for a Sound Strategy

Strategic planning is a group effort. There are many factors that help you achieve success. When you meet for strategic reviews, you will want to include not only your high-level management staff but also members of other departments. These include people who work directly with your customers, the product itself, and other significant aspects of your product and its success. Have them come prepared with insights from their specific functions. For example, those who work directly with your customers should report any important trends that they find in their support tickets. A software development team could note the most common feature requests. Bring data on information that contributes insight to the conversation, including market reports and publications within your industry.

Dedicate a specific part of this meeting to reviewing your key performance indicators from the previous year. Each department should present its data and provide its insight into the results. If you majorly deviated from your expected goals, conduct additional research to find out why it happened. These can include surveys, focus groups, and comparisons with industry standards at that time.

After reviewing your performance, look at ways that you can take advantage of the following year. Given the changes in your industry, you can identify further opportunities. For example, you can adopt a new piece of software that helps you run your processes quickly or discuss acquiring another company. One benefit of having everybody in the same meeting is aligning your internal and external procedures from the planning phase on. For example, if you plan to take on more customers, you can simultaneously look at software to help you handle them. Or, if you would like to increase customer satisfaction, you can find what your team needs to improve their experience.

What to Expect From Your Plans

How will you plot a path if you do not know where you are going? Much like a good map, a strategic plan aligns your business with its goals. Even more, solid planning helps you understand your business in more depth and see it in the context of its industry. Companies with a reliable plan should expect to see increased efficiency, happier teams, higher profits, and greater resilience in the face of challenges.

Increased Efficiency

No company’s resources are infinite. Having a clear-cut plan sets priorities in line so you can dedicate resources to what is needed the most. By keeping your goals in sight, you can increase your business’s revenue and then fund less urgent projects when the time is right. Teams that understand their overall direction work more efficiently and invest more in their team’s outcomes.

Happier Teams

People thrive on consistency. Aligning your strategy with your business’s actions provides team members with a clear sense of priority and direction. Rather than inadvertently working against each other’s interests, your communication plan will ensure that each stakeholder understands their common goal. Often, individuals work better with some structure rather than full, open creativity. Providing a framework for your company’s efforts creates stability where you need it and allows flexibility where it benefits you the most.

Higher Profits

A reliable plan will help your company work together, which makes operations more efficient. Increased efficiency leads to savings across the board and more opportunities for creative solutions. Freeing up your team’s energy with good planning results in faster project completion time, a higher return on investment, and a competitive edge. Teams that plan ahead consider their surroundings and stay in tune with new developments in their industries.

Tracking your strategy and results allows you to compare your performance with your expectations. This shows you what is and is not working so you can tailor your approach for better results. Then, you can allocate your resources to the areas that need them and plan more efficiently. Over time, you will see improvements to your overall return on investment and market share.

Resistance to Challenges

Being resistant to challenges does not mean that you will be immune to them. It means you will be prepared to deal with new developments, and that your staff will have the tools to adjust when faced with change. Since you will frequently be reviewing your plan, you can view it in the context of the overall industry and adjust it when you see changes. Unlike businesses that rigidly stick to their plans despite new information, flexible businesses account for new developments and move with them. Often, there are new opportunities that many businesses miss by sticking to their current plan. Think of the opportunities missed by Polaroid, Blockbuster, and Sears when their industries changed.

How to Evaluate Your Business’s Strategy

The goal of your corporate strategy is to make a specific impact. You can evaluate this by writing down exactly what you want to get done and then tracking your current efforts to see their results. Your strategy should point you in this direction, and your leadership staff guides the implementation. Meet with your team and identify the metrics you will use to determine your success.

Each policy your company implements should be tied to a specific goal. Rather than thinking about these goals in an individual context, incorporate them into your larger mission. How will each one of these contribute to your aim? Make these planning documents available to each stakeholder involved, so they understand the purpose behind these guidelines and generate accountability for adhering to the plans.

Setting Achievable Goals

Make sure your goals are as specific as possible. Vague goals are hard to reach. Think of someone who claims they want to “grow their business.” What exactly does that mean? Is there a specific revenue goal you are trying to reach? Does it have to do with your market share? Be specific when planning your next steps.

How will it appear when you are there? Visualize the end result of this goal as a complete experience. Revisit your goals often, preferably at the start of each strategy discussion. Habit and repetition solidify these ideas and keep them fresh in each person’s mind. It is better to be overly specific than overly vague.

If you are having trouble deciding on your goals, pick something and stick to it. Be decisive. It does not matter if it is not your company’s end goal. It is more important to choose a direction and commit to it. If it is not right later, you will find out when you better understand the path you should be on. If you choose a vague goal or none at all, you can expect your results to be aimless as well.

Making your goals public fosters accountability. Ideally, they should appear on the same page as your mission statement. Your team and your clients will understand what is important to you and align themselves better with your mission. Transparency is your biggest asset.

After planning your goals and making them public, set both deadlines and rewards for their completion. The extra steps provide motivation to reach farther than just doing what is required at the moment. Rewards for your team can include bonuses, recognition, time off, or any incentives that they value. Remember that your incentives must be important to the people receiving them, as they must build their personal motivation to work towards the goals.

Fine-Tuning and Troubleshooting Your Strategy

Once you set your goals, evaluate the progress and fine-tune your plan. Even when your strategy is sound, other factors affect its effectiveness. When you evaluate your strategy, look at the following areas to find out where you can improve: how practical is the plan, whether your team is consistent with its implementation, whether your plan’s environment supports its requirements, whether you have all the available resources to carry out the plan, how much risk must you take, and how restrictive your deadlines are.

The first deterrent to your plan’s success is a lack of practicality. This involves conflicting goals or values. For example, if your goals were to provide customers with more app features and also to streamline their experience, you would have to find a way to either consolidate or prioritize the conflicting aims. In this kind of scenario, it is important to know the essence of what you are trying to accomplish. Focus on the meaning behind your goals and take better steps to reach them.

Once you are sure of the practicality, check how consistent your team is. They should have clear procedures that direct their efforts in complementary ways. If you find duplicated work or conflicting priorities, this is the first place to look. Also, check that their environment and resources complement the tasks at hand. If they are missing key tools or support for the projects assigned, the results will not meet expectations. Projects with unrealistic or restrictive deadlines create additional stress and turn counterproductive in the long run. Make sure you evaluate your deadlines and the overall risk for each project, so your team has the right resources to meet your goals.

Strategic Planning as an Operating System

The businesses that sustain growth through complexity are not the ones with the best plans. They are the ones who built their planning process into the organization’s operating architecture, so that strategy review, resource allocation, and accountability become routine rather than exceptional.

Strategic planning helps your business in every aspect. It prepares you for the future and creates an environment conducive to growth. Companies with better strategic planning outperform competitors and become industry leaders. Success means something different to everyone, so define what you value and then design the steps to get there.

The question worth asking is not whether your strategy is correct. It is whether your organization is built to carry it. A business strategy consultant or fractional COO addresses both simultaneously — validating the direction and rebuilding the operating system around it so the plan actually runs.