How Your Strategic Planning Can Help Your Business Thrive

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Editor’s Note: This author is guest authored by John Courtney, Founder and Chief Executive of BoardroomAdvisors.co (full bio at end of article).

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Has the success of your business’ strategic plan slowed down?

Should you try to improve an existing plan or create a new one?

Strategy is key to business. Without a strong and proactive strategic direction your business will likely fail to reach its potential. The business world is ever changing and therefore so are the strategies needed to move your business forward.

It is highly unlikely that one strategy will always remain effective in your business’ life. Because of this you need to have in place a system where your strategic direction is constantly being assessed and new strategies are being planned.

This article will give you effective tools to evaluate your strategy, create new strategies for your business, and show you case studies of companies doing this successfully.

Evaluate Your Current Strategy

A good strategy plan can become less effective at any time because the world around your business is always changing. That is why it is crucial to have a regular strategy evaluation process in place.

It is not a problem if your strategy stops being effective but it is a problem if you don’t do anything about it. A tool you may have heard of before, SWOT,  is perfect for evaluating where your company is and whether you need a new strategy to push forward.

SWOT

For those that have never heard of SWOT, it is a grid tool that facilitates the evaluation of your business by looking at its strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats that may be coming.

This tool works best as a brainstorming exercise with your leadership team. This is so you can get as many ideas down for each section as possible and then whittle them down to the best ones.

While assessing your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses, you should be looking at whether your previous strategies have been successful – i.e., what were the strengths and weaknesses of your previous strategic direction. It’s crucial to evaluate this before making a new strategy plan.

Having assessed the strengths and weaknesses of your previous plans you’ll then be in a good position to look at the potential external opportunities and threats that your business may face. With the knowledge of what previously did and didn’t work you can begin to create a new strategic direction for your business.

Crisis Strategy Assessment

In a crisis, every business needs a plan. Crises can take many forms. From a halt in your business’ supply chain to a global pandemic, the process of negotiating a crisis should be the same for your business.

Developing a plan in a crisis situation can at times seem overwhelming so it’s important to have a process in place that facilitates strategy development. This can take form in the Crisis Strategy Assessment which poses all the questions you need to answer in order to develop a plan.

These questions are:

• What will change or has changed in the world?
• What will change or has changed in your industry?
• How will this affect or has affected your revenue streams?
• How will this change or has it changed your value proposition?
• How will this alter or has it altered your customer segments and relationships?
• How will this alter or has it altered distribution channels and partners?
• How are your resource needs going to change or have they already changed?
• How is your cost structure going to be affected or has been affected?

The answers to these questions will inform the decisions you make when you formulate your plan and strategy. The Crisis Strategy Assessment should again be completed with your leadership team as the more minds who understand the business the better.

Creating Your New Strategy

Once you have evaluated your previous plans and set the basis for creating your new strategy you need to, as a leadership team, develop your future strategic direction.

SWOT analysis and Crisis Management Assessment give you a great basis to develop a new strategy and the next tool will make it easy to create your actionable strategy.

MOST Analysis

This tool is a brilliant way to organise your company’s plan for the future into an actionable strategic plan. MOST stands for Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.

• MISSION – As with all plans, it is best to start with the end in mind. You need to discuss where you want your business to be by the completion of your new strategy – and you need to discuss this amongst the leadership team. For MOST analysis this is your mission and it is best to keep this to just turnover and profit.

Don’t misconstrue your mission with your business vision as to where it wants to be because, while this your vision is important, it is very difficult to evaluate by the end of your plan. This is why your mission should be kept to just turnover and profit because this is a tangible and measurable goal.

You should also give your business a timescale to complete this mission because again this adds a level of measurability to your plan. So, essentially decide how much profit and turnover you want your company to achieve by a certain time (e.g., 1 year).

• OBJECTIVES – These are the goals that your business will need to achieve to reach your mission. Do not worry about how you will achieve these goals, just brainstorm ideas of targets that your business will need to achieve.

For example, you may decide that to get to the turnover and profit your business desires, your business will have to enter new markets, perhaps international markets.

When finalising your objectives, it is helpful to remember the “which will” technique. This gets you thinking about the reason your business needs each objective. For each objective extend the sentence with “which will” to give the desired intention of each goal.

Keeping with the entering new markets example your objective may look like this, “We will enter new markets which will bring us new customers and increase our turnover and profit.”

• STRATEGIES – The next step in MOST analysis is to begin thinking about strategies you could implement to achieve your objectives. These strategies are general approaches that your business could take, so again, don’t worry about the “hows” yet because that will come in the final part of this tool.

Following on from the entering new markets example, a strategy to achieve this could be to hire a part-time marketing director that can help you plan for how to reach the new markets. For each objective, have at least two strategies attached to it. This will give your business options and make success more likely.

• TACTICS –  The final part of MOST analysis is the creation of your actionable plan. The tactics outline who does what and when and clarifies the practicality behind the strategies you have listed.

Within this plan it is important to delegate so everyone knows who’s doing what and there also needs to be clear channels of communication set up. This will allow your plan to run as effectively as possible.

Your tactics should be kept as a working document so that everyone can literally be on the same page and see the strategic direction, and more importantly the actions, so that your strategy can be executed as effectively as possible.

Case Studies

Boardroom Advisors work with brilliant businesses at all stages of their life to offer expertise and skills in order to help companies reach their potential.

These case studies show how, with some evaluation and strategic planning, companies can excel and maximise their value.

Fulcrum

Fulcrum is an international firm that works exclusively on compliance, investigations, and defence across varying sectors globally. As a company, they approached Boardroom Advisors because they wanted assistance developing a strategy plan to achieve their desired growth target.

With the help of Boardroom Advisors, Fulcrum went through the process this article has laid out. It began with a 360-degree evaluation of the business with a particular interest in the marketing and positioning of the company.

Through SWOT and then MOST analysis to develop an actionable strategy, it became clearer that Fulcrum would benefit greatly from a new website. This was part of the new marketing strategy with the aim of finessing the branding of Fulcrum and to keep on a clear and concise message whenever anyone interacts with the company.

Kaiasm 

Kaism is a business that operates in the world of strategic knowledge creation and it came to Boardroom Advisors with the desire to improve their sales operation.

As stated in this article, the best place to start is with an evaluation of the current strategic approach. Through a SWOT, it became clear that this business had many strengths and a few weaknesses, which then pushed for the formation of a new strategy plan.

Through consultancy with a part-time Sales Director, a strategy was developed to simplify Kaiasm’s commercial proposition. This was done through modernising the proposal format and the results of this was greater customer engagement with the company.

Kaiasm also had the issue of being hit by the effects of the pandemic. This was clearly highlighted in the threats aspect of conducting the SWOT.

By breaking down the crisis into manageable sections through tools such as the Crisis Management Assessment, solutions can be identified much faster.

Kaiasm have been able to negotiate the crisis and implement new strategy plans which have led to the new found confidence of the sales team to grow sales faster.

Apricot

Apricot is a successful online educator, and they approached Boardroom Advisors with the desire to find solutions to some ongoing business challenges.

They wanted to grow their client base, which is something every company will need to do at some point. Apart from this, they wanted to grow efficiently without having to make a major change.

In order to fully understand the business to then develop strategy, their advisor led a strategic review. From this SWOT and MOST analysis, it was decided that specialist resources would need to be brought in to support Apricot’s social media and website content development

The advisor also set up cash flow monitoring controls for clearer visibility and increased confidence for Apricot.

The result of the actionable plan they created with Boardroom Advisors was 150K worth of impact on social investment and an increase in leads for the company.

To Sum Up

Businesses thrive when there is a strong strategic plan in place. There is no one plan that fits all or even one plan that will consistently work for your business. The key is to consistently review and evaluate your strategy to see if it’s still the right plan for you. When reviewing your strategy, use the SWOT tool for an easy and quick fire way to assess where your company is. It’s a visual tool and is a great way to get your leadership teams’ thoughts out onto the table and serves as a basis for new strategic plans.

When in the face of a crisis, use the Crisis Management Assessment to break down the situation into manageable sections, and again, this can be used as the basis for creating a reactive and positive strategy.

In the creation of your strategy, the best tool to use is MOST analysis. This concisely gets you to think about where specifically you want your business to be and how to get there. Through the tactics you will create an actionable strategic plan which is essentially how things get done.

These are tools hugely useful in the armoury of Boardroom Advisors for helping other companies plan and strategise. Fulcrum, Kaism, and Apricot have all benefited from realising there may be a better strategy to solve some of their companies’ issues and asked for assistance in doing so.

If your business needs a new strategy but you feel you want assistance in creating an actionable plan, then you may benefit from hiring a part-time advisor.  An advisor will bring a wealth of business strategy experience and it is always helpful to have an outside eye because they can offer a different perspective that can be harder to see from the centre of the business.

All the tools mentioned in this article can be downloaded in this free Business Strategy Toolkit.

About the Author: John Courtney

John Courtney is Founder and Chief Executive of BoardroomAdvisors.co which provides part-time Executive Directors (Commercial/Operations/Managing Directors), Non-Executive Directors and paid Mentors to SMEs without either a recruitment fee or a long term contract.

John is a serial entrepreneur, having founded 7 different businesses over a 40 year period, including a digital marketing agency, corporate finance and management consultancy. He has trained and worked as a strategy consultant, raised funding through Angels, VCs and crowd funding, and exited businesses via MBO, MBI and trade sale. He has been ranked #30 in CityAM’s list of UK Entrepreneurs.

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