Strategic Business Planning

This snippet consists of tips around best practice for building a Strategic Business Operating Plan. How to make this approach; Unconstrained, Team Based, with Long & Short Term Milestones and have a Integrated Execution Plan.
Transcript: "Strategic Business Planning"
Hi everybody! It’s Peter Selby again from Business Drivers. Welcome to our Business Drivers Profit and Growth Series episode number two. Today I am going to be talking to you about Strategic Planning and some of the tips and things to look for out there and what we’ve seen from our recent observations around the marketplace.

To start, I am not sure if people are aware, and it always surprises us, actually about 80% of businesses, don’t have a working business strategy. That is a clear direction of the future that the rest of the organization is aligned to. Even less have one that is executable across the business, with everyone sort of pulling in the right direction.

This is businesses, large and small. you know, I’m talking from, Bluechip, Fortune 500 companies right down to sole traders, are often running, almost rudderless if you like, by not having that strategy worked out now.

Obviously, strategic planning in house has a multitude of complexities, but there are some simple tips for it, I’m going to run through those with you today.

So just a tip and again, an observation from us, if you have a plan that is team driven, the team are driving the plan and moving it along and the CEO or the senior executive or whoever it may be, the business owner, are the people removing the obstacles for the team.

Those businesses tend to have up to 30% or so more momentum. It’s amazing to watch actually, it’s quite often missed in businesses, but I guess the first tip is make sure that you have a clear picture of the future and we’re talking two or three years at least into the future.

Also you can describe what your business will look like if it is unconstrained. i.e. if you have solved all the business issues you have today and therefore anything is possible, what would good look like in your business in the future.

Laos have some clear model stones that connect you to that future position, and also have some medium term milestones that act as a bridge between any execution plans you have today and that future position and that those links are really, really important.

The best plans we’ve seen with companies are where they can clearly have an execution plan that’s designed as part of the strategy and have that linking in the medium term and the long-term milestones. The businesses that do that well are businesses that tend to be thriving. All the thriving businesses certainly need that as a foundation.

Also make sure that your strategy makes room for a clear, deep understanding of the current business environment, your competitor environment, what’s what in the market dynamics around you, what’s going to enable this strategy to be successful and what isn’t, and also have a clearly designed approach to market.

The way that you are going to go after the various verticals you might be playing in as a business and what that might look like. It is also really important that this is communicated across the business.

Design the plan in such a way that you can communicate it at all the business levels. It’s no good having a plan that’s really complex because, from a communication perspective, you can’t explain it to anyone that can’t readily understand it, make it as visual as possible. This is really, really critical.

Another thing that we see an awful lot of in the market, is people have thought through a strategy, got a plan and the only people that know about it are the people that compiled the plan. The rest of the business isn’t necessarily aligned nor really understand what that strategy is going to drive for them personally and for the business.

As usual. if you have any questions about anything I’ve talked about, um, you can email us at [email protected] or go to our website www.bizdrivers.biz. You can contact us there and we can certainly steer you in the right direction.

That is all I’m going to talk about today. Next time I will be talking about Strategic Sales and the approach to that. What you can put in your business, just some key tips of observations we see that might help you.

Okay. Until then I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.

You can always call me personally, free of charge, to ask any questions about topics I have discussed, just grab a time that suits you at:

https://calendly.com/business-advice/coaching