Planning is essential to the success of Your business. When Your company has a plan to follow, You and your team are better equipped to prepare for the future. A business plan creates a focus for Your company, uniting employees toward common goals and objectives.  It also gives you a baseline to measure how you are performing and to understand what may need adjusting.  

 

The purpose of strategic planning is to set overall goals and objectives and to develop a plan to achieve them. It involves stepping back from your day-to-day operations and asking where Your business is headed and what its priorities should be. It is important  because it provides a sense of direction and outlines measurable goals. Strategic planning is a tool that is useful for guiding day-to-day decisions and also for evaluating progress and changing approaches when moving forward.

 

What are the basic steps in developing your strategic plan?

​

This can be for your business overall or for specific areas such as Finance and Marketing.  The overall process involves defining the:

Current Situation (situational Analysis).

Company Purpose

Company Aims and Direction

Business Plan/s

Review Process

 

In more detail:

1. External Analysis - factors outside the company including:

   1. Political, Economic, Social, Technology​, Legal & Environmental -  Situation and Opportunity

   2. Competitor analysis

2. Internal Analysis​ - factors within the company

3. ​Reviewing the information as a whole​

   1. GAP Analysis

   2. SWOT​

4. Reviewing and updating (if necessary) Vision, Mission and Values.​

5. Setting long term Goals

6. Agreeing Objectives

7. Defining Strategies - In broad terms, what you need to do to achieve Your objectives and goals

8. Your Tactics, at a 'lower-level'. what are some of the things You need to do?

   1. What, When, Where, Why and How (including finance).

9. Reporting - a key area, this is how you know whether you are achieving what you started out to do!

   1. Key Indicators

   2. Reports

   3. Dashboards

10. Review - how is the Company and the Marketplace doing? Maybe 'fine-tune' your approach if necessary.

​

What part of this is my Business Plan?

​

To be honest - all of it!  The first part of the Strategic Plan (1-7) is what guides you when writing Your Business Plans, however you should not have to go back and change goals, objectives and strategies every time.  You update your current situation and 'tie' the plans into Your Company's Strategic Plan.  This is the guidance for deciding on the details and reviewing performance (elements 8 - 10).  Of course you do need to review (10) the strategic plan regularly to ensure that it is still relevant and up-to-date.

​

So we know that planning is important as it allows you to prioritise work, it helps us to identify our goals and objectives clearly.  Planning will also help us see in advance those things that can help us achieve our goals and objectives and those things that can prevent us from achieving them and to work out what to do about them. Planning helps You and Your team to be accountable for what You and they do.

​

If you would like more information or a free consultation please fill in the contact form or you can email or call us to discuss how we can help you.

​

​