In the quest for higher profits and growth, every business needs a well-spun
strategic plan that plots a path to uninterrupted success. But getting such a
plan together isn’t easy.
Typically, an owner and employees gather for exhaustive planning sessions
over a long weekend to labor over the wording of elusive, long-range goals.
Always well-intentioned, this painstaking, left-brain exercise usually yields a
wordy and abstract document that ends up buried on someone's hard drive or
collecting dust on a bookshelf.
If this sounds familiar, head back to the drawing board and outline another
strategic plan with the following tips in mind:
Designate where you want to end up and when. Numbers can be a powerful
force to focus your planning. First, determine how many years out you want to
plan--two, five, 10? Then, define the numbers that will indicate success for
you. For example, what will your revenue be by a given year? What profit margin
do you want to show?
Selecting exact numbers to represent where you want to end up will be
critical to channeling your energies and your team members’ efforts.
Design what you want "life" to look like. Design your life as part of
your business. So many strategic plans fail because they do not include a design
for the lives of the people who lead the company. Detail what quality of life
will look like for you and your employees once the plan is complete. What hours
will you work? Where will you live? How will your plan affect loved ones? How
will this plan empower you to contribute to others?
Designing what life outside the business could optimally look like will drive
everything you do inside your business to support that outcome.
Convert your "gaps" to mini-goals. Once your destination has been set
and your quality of life designed, you need to ask: What’s missing to achieve
the desired outcomes? The way to bridge these gaps in your strategic plan is to
turn them into goals and translate them into calendared action steps.
Move forward by planning backward. To give your strategic plan real
traction, always remember that it's much easier to plan backward from an outcome
than forward from a hope. That's why you and your team members will want to fill
in the missing details of what it will take to execute your mini-goals from the
point of completion backward to today. That will make the process less emotional
and more methodical, leaving you with a plan to live by instead of a hope to
live up to.
An effective strategic plan should never be a cerebral, sterile document that
ends up archived or hidden away like the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's a detailed
personal and business plan for powerful growth that can be converted into clear
action steps that are plugged into your daily calendar.