The Strategic Plan

The Small Business’ True Working Document: The Strategic Plan

In today’s competitive business environment, strategy is more than just a catch phrase. It’s a necessary tool that will help you identify your niche in the marketplace and set your company apart from the competition. However, many entrepreneurs fail to consider the importance of taking their overriding strategy and turning it into something tangible.

Now is the time to change your way of thinking and prepare yourself to write your business’ true working document – the strategic plan. This is the document that you will use to make all of the strategic decisions for your business. I like to call it the “New Business Plan.”

But first we should discuss what strategy is in general and why it is crucial to sustaining a successful business enterprise.

Why You Need a Strategy: Strategy is defining where you want to go with your company and how you plan to get there. Your strategy is what enables you to ensure that your day-to-day tasks and decisions complement your long-term business vision while meeting your customers’ needs. The best way to implement a strategy is to generate a strategic plan – a document that clearly defines the goals you have for each area of your business and maps out executable steps to reach them.

Writing your strategic plan involves planning, developing, and implementing your business vision. The document you produce communicates a long-range plan of action that will help you achieve your company’s goals year-by-year and, once in place, will provide a means of monitoring your progress. It also should specify alterative actions if you find that you’re unlikely to meet the goals in the original plan.

Your strategic plan gives you the vehicle you need to build your business yet remains dynamic; changing and adjusting your business as the market demands.

Preparing Your Strategic Plan: First, write down your long-range business vision. The simple act of putting pen to paper to write down your vision makes it more real and will help you think critically about how you can implement it.

Next, review your feasibility plan. By now, you should have assessments of your business (SWOT, success team, business viability), analysis and research (of your target market, the industry, your competition, and the business environment), and test marketing (from surveys, prototypes, and input from family and friends). Examine the information you’ve compiled and determine how it relates to each aspect of your business by asking yourself, “What resources do you have at your disposal and how can you use them?”

With this information, describe the actions you can take daily, monthly, and yearly to reach your goals, establishing benchmarks to evaluate your development. Keep in mind that the success of your business is the direct result of how you EXECUTE your strategic plan.

Your Next Step: Take the information from this article and conduct your own research about strategy. If you’re unsure of where to begin, start with getting educated on strategy through your local resources including our company Efficio, Inc. Once you’ve grasped the concept of strategy, define how strategy will fit into your business overall and figure out how you can integrate it into each aspect of your business. Then write it down. In the end, with your strategic plan in hand, you will be able to move forward confidently and be ready for anything. To much success…

©Effició, Inc. Sherese Duncan

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