STEP 1: Planning to Plan, getting organized
It is always a good idea to scan your environment and list what are the trends today, and what are the issues that may be worthwhile concerns for the future development of your business. These may involve areas such as: social and demographical, competitive, economical, political, technical, industry, and customer influences.
STEP 2: Creating Your Vision
This is where actual strategic planning begins. The step is concerned with formulating dreams that are worth believing in and fighting for within the very reason why you are in business. Include other partners or employees that have influence in your business, as “people support what they help create”.
- Develop a Vision Statement: it will be a direct reflection of your hopes and dreams for the future
- Write a Mission Statement: it will describe the very reason why you are in business, what it does and its purpose
- Discover your Core Values: they are the values that determine how you act, think and live and will guide you and your team to behave within those values, thus creating the desired culture for your business. (Ex: Integrity, Honesty, Customer-focused, etc.)
STEP 3: Indicators Showing your Progress/Success
It is important to have targets that become your quantifiable indicators that will show your progress and determine the level of success that you and your business are achieving. Therefore, in order to measure this effectively, keep in mind the following questions when developing those indicators:
- How do I know if I am being successful?
- How do I know if I am getting into trouble?
- If off course, what corrective action should I take?
As well, decide what areas will define success for you by examining the different aspects of your business. (Ex: Customer Satisfaction, Profitability, Market Penetration, Productivity, Employee Satisfaction).
STEP 4: Review your actual situation
This step takes inventory of current conditions and the actual situation of your business today. Specific actions (strategies) will then be defined to run the business according to the new plan
Within this step, you may choose to have an organizational analysis of your internal strengths and weaknesses, either completed by an external firm (easy & affordable: Go Commerce Go), or conducted internally as a self assessment with a SWOT tool of some type. Then identifying what is clearly missing and required for the business to move on and achieve its new goals and vision, will be the focus for developing the key actions and strategies for that change in the next step.
STEP 5: Actions Development (Strategies)
Focus on your 3 to 7 main actions (strategies) by developing them into primary means (the “how to”), or activities that will help achieve your future vision. These strategies become actual managerial priorities used by everyone as a framework to form the next organizational structure of your business. They should also be tracked through your progress indicators in Step 3 above. If needed, go back and adjust the indicators to ensure that you are measuring the strategic items in themselves that will lead to your vision and successful implementation of the actions.
STEP 6: Annual Plans & Budgeting
Annual plans and strategic budgets is where the “rubber meets the road”. Begin by breaking down your actions list from Step 5 into prioritized tasks that relate to the different business units of your operations. Each action item (listed on a plan sheet) should indicate the responsible person, its annual target (weekly is ok), its priority, resources needed, and how accountability will be monitored.
The funneling of those first 3-7 strategies should be consistent through the organization with all tasks assigned so that all progress is automatically captured through its own indicator. As it plans for the year ahead for all units, this is a true proven method for achieving goals and becoming successful on a daily basis, as management remains strategically focused year round!
Budgeting: you should change the way budgeting is traditionally done. Good strategic budgeting follows annual planning and not the other way around. Do not have budgeting lead the business, but have your plan lead the budget. So many organizations have the budgeting activity ran as a specific task, that then it leads the entire organization with no business direction. This is where we hear it all the time: the financials are only statistics, and do not act as a guide to the business' direction.
By reversing the process and using "budgeting" as a follow-up to the plan, then it allows and empowers the team to achieve a focused allocation of resources based on the strategic plan, all meant to achieve the goals set forth.
STEP 7: Plan to implement
This step focuses on the process of educating and organizing to manage the implementation of the strategic plan. It deals with that very difficult aspect----change. Not everyone likes it, not everyone understands why it should happen. Since it will pose action (or reactions) for each individual in your business including yourself, it is important to address it first hand, as change will definitely rock the boat.
