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Actual for You - An Annual Strategic Planning Process for Small Businesses
Has this ever happened to you: You have been working at a particular job for a few years. It’s not the greatest job and it hasn’t always allowed you to capitalize on your unique gifts or talents. But it’s ok, and it pays the bills. The job has become a part of your life’s routine.Then one day, without any forewarning, you’re let go. In what seems like a split second, you go from being gainfully employed to joining the ranks of the unemployed. It’s a shock to the system.A tremendous level of stress can accompany being unemployed. You’re certainly affected by the loss of income. You may also have a related drop in your level of confidence. Your unemployment may be impacting your home life and personal relationships. There may be a degree of depression that you are dealing with. Y
When I was nearly hitting the age of 30 something inside me changed I noticed I was starting to question my worth and why am I doing this job. As a manager for a big pub chain I had enough of dealing with complaint after complaint and serving rubbish products. That is when I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do with my future.I then came up with the idea that I wanted to run my own restaurant. This restaurant had to be started from scratch as I wanted to build it from nothing to a busy restaurant and have no wise cracks from people saying "they did not used to do it that way" or "so and so used to do it this way".I then made a list of things that I believe make a successful restaurant, these were:LocationBusiness Partners involvedSkills of empl
In the last issue we discuss the need for a strategic plan, even in small companies, and the key questions that all managers, and even other employees must be able to answer for optimum results in your company.
The Strategic Planning Process I Recommend:
Team Meeting #1 - Brainstorming the “WHAT” – Most likely here the CEO puts the first stake in the ground, proposing “WHAT” the objectives are for the coming year. This is just a starting point for discussion really though. It might be as simple as a percentage growth goal, or as complex as a bunch of new market niches and/or product combinations to explore. There is much discussion about what is achievable, how and why or why not. This needs to be a safe environment to brainstorm, say anything and challenge everything. Your culture must not only allow, but must encourage dissent and heated discussion. Without this you will be growing a team of “yes men” (and women) that are there to simply validate what the CEO wants. At this point we are getting the team’s input on “What” we want to achieve this year. This can be a bottomless pit of time and discussions and at some point the CEO needs to decide on limits. Details should not be discussed unless they make the objectives impractical. This is more of a brainstorming meeting and can easily take several hours. I like to call these “Summits” and do them offsite to get people away from distractions and enhance creativity. If you can afford it make it a paid weekend foliage or ski trip with this meeting being the focal point of the weekend and lots of time for people to bond personally too. The quicker this gets done the better your team is really – the more alignment in thinking anyway. However are you pushing the envelope of creativity and options? If this stretches out to several meetings without some clear agreement on the “what” then you should probably bring in an outside facilitator or advisor.
Individual Department First Draft Developed - The team now goes away and individually prepares what they think is achievable for their department written down in terms of quarterly goals and priorities. This is 1-3 pages per department, not anything big, as it is still dynamic and just a proposal. Sometimes a list of potential projects and priorities, things to try and larger items for discussion is even sufficient at this stage. Avoid schedules at this stage, as you will most likely rearrange order and priorities. These senior people will seek out and meet with others to discuss dependencies, timelines and how they will accomplish some goals fairly informally. This off-line work should build enough confidence and framework to go to the next step and surface any conflict to be brought to the group for disc
A good sales manager and Sales Trainer must teach each and every salesperson of the sales force for their company the importance of relationship building. Consider if you will the very competitive marketplace where your company and the competition compete head to head. Your competition offers specials, bundling of services and products and even special terms for payment.Often it is hard to keep track of what your competition is doing and therefore your salespeople may lose sales because the competition is willing to do something at the last minute in order to make the sale that your salesperson has no idea of. Instead your salesperson gets an excuse or another round of objections, which have no bearing on reality of the prospects interests, desires or problems with the sale.If the sal
Individual Department First Draft Developed - The team now goes away and individually prepares what they think is achievable for their department written down in terms of quarterly goals and priorities. This is 1-3 pages per department, not anything big, as it is still dynamic and just a proposal. Sometimes a list of potential projects and priorities, things to try and larger items for discussion is even sufficient at this stage. Avoid schedules at this stage, as you will most likely rearrange order and priorities. These senior people will seek out and meet with others to discuss dependencies, timelines and how they will accomplish some goals fairly informally. This off-line work should build enough confidence and framework to go to the next step and surface any conflict to be brought to the group for dis
Let me begin by stating that the best way to handle a crisis, is to prevent one.So when it comes to things like network and computer failures, it behooves you to: use reliable computer systems; employ the best possible technical staff to keep your network trouble-free and respond to problems; make back-ups of your data and software (at least daily); and adopt industry best practices, such as security practices. The same goes with all your plant and equipment.Nevertheless, disasters happen. Natural disasters. Terrorist attacks. There are some things that are simply unforeseeable.So the second best way to handle a crisis, is to be prepared for one. This might sound contradictory -- how can you prepare for something that you can't imagine happening?Well, firstly, there are thi
Individual Department First Draft Developed - The team now goes away and individually prepares what they think is achievable for their department written down in terms of quarterly goals and priorities. This is 1-3 pages per department, not anything big, as it is still dynamic and just a proposal. Sometimes a list of potential projects and priorities, things to try and larger items for discussion is even sufficient at this stage. Avoid schedules at this stage, as you will most likely rearrange order and priorities. These senior people will seek out and meet with others to discuss dependencies, timelines and how they will accomplish some goals fairly informally. This off-line work should build enough confidence and framework to go to the next step and surface any conflict to be brought to the group for dis
For many business owners, the process of balancing resources for reaching existing customers and attracting new business can be a difficult task. Advertising business services and products can be done by direct marketing, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet sites, mail, promotional giveaways, and more. No matter how your business implements its marketing strategy, the purpose behind all the methods used is to stay connected to the people who purchase your products, and to increase public awareness based on what your company can afford to spend.Problems with using mass media approaches are in the level of noise and expense your business will have to fight its way though to capture attention. Placing adds in newspapers, television advertisements, and other forms of mass adverti
Individual Department First Draft Developed - The team now goes away and individually prepares what they think is achievable for their department written down in terms of quarterly goals and priorities. This is 1-3 pages per department, not anything big, as it is still dynamic and just a proposal. Sometimes a list of potential projects and priorities, things to try and larger items for discussion is even sufficient at this stage. Avoid schedules at this stage, as you will most likely rearrange order and priorities. These senior people will seek out and meet with others to discuss dependencies, timelines and how they will accomplish some goals fairly informally. This off-line work should build enough confidence and framework to go to the next step and surface any conflict to be brought to the group for dis
Don’t begin your branding campaign blindly. Branding is much more than just a thoughtful logo or slogan. It’s more than just a unique color scheme. There are steps that need to be taken in order to start your successful brand image. Doing research within the company will greatly improve the success of your brand.Examine the CompetitionOne of the keys to creating a successful brand image is to differentiate yourself from your competition. To do this you need to know how consumers view your competition. You need to know how your competitors differentiate themselves from the market. Also, you should know your competitors strengths and weaknesses. Your business can benefit from knowing this information by learning from competitor’s weaknesses,
CEO Challenge and Review - CEO and most department heads should probably meet one-on-one to flush out these first drafts before meeting #2.
Team Meeting # 2 – Validating “It” Can Be Done - Each team member now presents their goals to the team and explains the risks, resources needed and rough timeline (quarters) for objectives (if there is good communications the managers have already compared timelines offline to coordinate this some). They should also make it clear WHY these are the right objectives for the company this year. Obviously financial costs and the resulting financial performance should be estimated.
By now the goals and priorities should be fairly clear, if not go back to step one and narrow the discussion to repeat the process – it should go quicker. Otherwise you should be simply working out more details and specifics. Ideally this will happen offline between managers and their people.
More Detailed Department Plan – Each department head, or team member, now works up the next level of detail with resources, needed, timelines and metrics for success and benchmarking progress. This is prepared to present to the entire group. As in step #2 team members meet as necessary with others to work out dependencies and get final input. They may even present what they have to the other department head too.
Team Meeting #3 – Agreeing on the “HOW” and “WHEN” – The team now meets to review an integrated plan with all department goals dovetailed to show they have a complete plan and understand how they will tie into other department’s goals and objectives too. If this process does not help and flush out most of your plan you have bigger problems and probably need some major changes and/or outside help to get through it. Don’t worry about making the document fancy, sometimes PowerPoint slides and Excel sheets with timelines and metric goals will do fine. The level of detail you require must be a function of the experience of the individual department head. The more experience they have, and the more trust you have for them, the less detail is required in the plan. However, as the company gets bigger and more people need to read the plan you may need to write more detail. Do worry about the team understanding it well. The value i
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