When it comes to business, one of the most important things you can do is create and implement a strategic plan. A strategic plan unifies your thoughts and ideas, identifies the most pressing problems your firm faces, generates innovative solutions to overcome them, and lays out a cohesive road map that you may follow to achieve your goals.
This blog post will discuss strategic plans, why you should use them, and how to create your own. Let’s get started!
A quick word on what to expect
Strategic planning goes beyond reviewing your company’s mission statement and vision statement and then setting goals based on what’s pressing now. Strategic planning is not filling out a one-page template with your mission and vision on top and a breakdown of OKRs underneath. It’s not fluffy, feel-good, “let’s bring in strategic planners from Havard Business School and feel really smart and inspired for a few days” kinda work.
In fact, if that’s what you’re looking for, a quick google search for “strategic plan template” should do the trick.
But, if you’re looking to go a bit deeper into strategy and find the thing that can be a game-changer for your company, keep reading.
We’ll get into the nitty gritty of what real strategy work entails (hint: it’s a lot of self-reflection and market analysis). It can make you feel a bit anxious and uncomfortable, but strategic planning can also get you excited about yours and your company’s future. If you’re ready to start, let’s dig in.
Why you need a strategic plan
There are a number of reasons why having a solid strategic plan is important for any business. For one, it helps to ensure that everyone in your organization is on the same page and working towards the same goal. It also allows you to track progress and make necessary adjustments along the way. Additionally, a good strategic plan can help attract investors and partners, as it shows that you have a clear vision, an understanding of your business, and a plan to accomplish it.
Who is involved in developing strategic plans?
Personally, we encourage everyone on a team to be involved in some aspect of strategic planning.
However, it’s common practice that top company leaders first develop the overall corporate strategy, then hand off the nitty-gritty details of how to implement the broader strategies to various business units within the organization.
Corporate Strategy Planning Stakeholders
- Executives
- Founders / CEOs
- Senior management
- Senior leadership
Business Unit Strategy Stakeholders
- Team leads and directors
- Business unit teams
- Individual contributors
Once you’ve got the people you need in the room, it’s time to start strategic planning.
The Strategic Planning Process
We’re going to break the strategic planning process down into just a few steps. They are:
- Step one: Put a finger on your biggest challenge
- Step two: Create strategic objectives and guiding policies
- Step three: Turn your guiding policies into strategic and coherent actions
- Step four: Communicate the heck out of your plan
Step One: Put a finger on your biggest challenge
The strategic planning process begins with what’s called “strategic thinking.” This is when you take a step back from the day-to-day operations of your business to think about the big picture.
Before we jump right into actually writing our strategic plan, we first have to engage in some strategic thinking.
Beware! Choose to skip this step and you’ll be creating an expensive document that will have little impact or relevance to business success. But it may make your e-team feel happy, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
Complete this step and you’ll better understand the internal and external strategic challenges affecting your company — leading to a clearer diagnosis of the problem and hence a better understanding of how you can overcome it.
Try to complete the following exercises during your strategic thinking time.
Tools for finding your biggest challenge
SWOT analysis
One popular tool used during the strategic thinking phase is called a SWOT analysis. This involves taking a close look at your company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Doing a SWOT analysis can help give you a better understanding of your business and where it stands in relation to your industry and competitors.
Balanced Scorecard methodology
The Balanced Scorecard methodology focuses on four key areas: financial performance, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and employee engagement.
Strategy mapping
An artifact of the Balanced Scorecard methodology is a strategy map. It takes the four key areas mentioned above and visually depicts all of them and how they fit together.
Creating a strategy map is a great way to help everyone on your team understand the company’s overall strategy, and how their individual goals fit into the bigger picture. However, they can lack the detailed planning needed to actually execute on the elements included in the map. That being said, it can still be an interesting exercise and way to thinking about customers, finance, operations, and employees.
Competitive strategy
After you’ve identified your company’s strengths and weaknesses, it’s time to start thinking about how you can use them to your advantage. This is where competitive strategy comes in. There are two main types of competitive strategies: offensive and defensive.
- An offensive strategy is one that helps you take market share away from your competitors. This can be done by offering a new product or service, entering into new markets, or acquiring other businesses.
- A defensive strategy is one that helps you protect your current market share. This can include things like price cuts, marketing campaigns, or process improvements.
Can you identify some offensive or defensive strategies for your org?
Market research and analysis
If you want to create an effective strategic plan, it’s important to have a good understanding of your target market. This includes things like who your ideal customer is, what their needs and wants are, and what they’re currently doing (or not doing) to meet those needs. There are a number of different ways to gather this information, including surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
While easy to skip over, this can be extremely helpful in understanding changing consumer behaviors and desires and is especially helpful when most of your work is “in the weeds” and you don’t have time to really zoom out and consider the macro environment of your industry.
Your own insights and knowledge of your business
Of course, in addition to market research, you should also rely on your own insights and knowledge of your business. After all, you know your company better than anyone else! This is where your competitive advantage comes in – use it to your advantage when formulating a strategy.
Time to play doctor
Ok, so you’ve gone through a bunch of thought exercises regarding your company’s strengths, weaknesses, finances, customers, competitors, employees, operations, market, industry, and insider knowledge.
Phew! Now what?
It’s time to diagnose your biggest challenge.
After all this analysis, your biggest challenges should be clearer. You may have one or two that stick out like a sore thumb. Or you may still require some more digging. If you’re in the latter camp, don’t be afraid to time to really think through these.
Which one you pick is up to you. You know your business and your market best.
Here are some examples of a diagnosis:
- We need to improve our market share
- Customers are no longer buying our product due to quality issues
- We’re no longer able to acquire customers profitably
- New regulations are about to make half our product line obsolete
Then once you’ve made the diagnosis, make it as simple and understandable as possible. Use analogies, examples, metaphors, frameworks, or something else. Whatever it takes to make it so easy to grok everyone from the highest level employees to the newest intern knows what it is and can explain it to someone else.
Have your diagnosis? Let’s move on to taking that diagnosis, turning it into an objective, and generally figuring out what needs to happen or change in order for us to reach our new objective.
Step Two: Create strategic objectives and guiding policies
Let’s move on to taking your approach and turning it into an objective and some policies and guardrails for how you plan to achieve it.
Your strategic objective
The next step in creating your strategic plan is to determine your strategic objective – or how you’ll know if your approach is successful.
Can you write an objective for this?
How will you know when you’ve overcome your biggest challenge? What metric could you measure against to determine success?
For example, let’s say your diagnosis is that your company needs to increase its market share. You’ll want to then take that goal and turn it into a more specific objective. This should be measurable, time-constrained, and realistic.
A strategic objective might look something like this:
“In the next 12 months, we want to increase our market share by 10% through Y marketing initiatives.”
or
“In the next 12 months, we want to increase our online visibility by improving our SEO and content strategy.”
These objectives should be specific enough that you can track progress and know when you’ve hit your goal.
Your guiding policies and processes
You have your diagnosis and you’ve turned it into a measurable objective. How you generally need to decide how the heck you plan on accomplishing this objective.
You need to determine your approach. Or more specifically, what kinds of policies, guidelines, and guardrails do you want to implement to achieve your objective?
This is where knowing yourself, your market, and your business comes in.
Not sure what approach to take? Here are a few questions to get the brain juices flowing:
- Are there any areas where you have or can create leverage?
- Are there any objectives, if accomplished, would change your business for the positive?
- Are there any bottlenecks to success you need to remove?
- Is there anything you can plan for or anticipate in the future that you can design a response to?
- Is there any policy or positioning you can really focus on?
- How can we build superior products or skills?
- Can we deepen any advantages, broaden our advantages, create deeper moats, or create higher demand for our products?
- Are there any waves of change in our industry we can ride?
- Do we have any inefficiencies we need to improve? Do competitors have inefficiencies we can exploit?
For example, if your objective is to increase market share, some possible approaches could be to:
- Reposition your product for a new customer persona / industry
- Move your product upmarket
- Change your pricing strategy
- Acquire or merge with another company
- Improve existing distribution channels or try new ones
Step three: Turn your guiding policies into strategic and coherent actions
Now that you know what policies and processes you want to put in place, it’s time to do some strategy execution. Effective strategic planning should include actions that support your guiding policies and are aligned with your organizational goals and your organization’s mission.
This is the part where many organizations fail. They either don’t have enough actions laid out, or they have too many actions and their plan becomes diluted and incoherent.
To get started on this part of the strategic planning process, you need to ask yourself what kinds of activities will help you achieve your objective.
And more importantly, what kinds of activities can you realistically do given your current resources? Internal and external environments and the business environment may constrain your ability to execute some actions. So how can you achieve your desired outcome with the capital or human resources you already have? Or can you need to shuffle people around to align resources around your strategic goals?
Sample strategy implementation & actions
For example, if your objective is to improve online visibility, some possible actions could be to:
- Start a blog and post once a week
- Improve existing blog content
- Create shareable infographics
- Guest blog on other websites
- Engage in social media promotion
- Participate in online forums and Q&A sites
- Submit articles to industry publications
Doing this may require shuffling resources from the sales team to the marketing team.
These are just a few examples. The point is that you want to focus on a limited number of activities that you can actually do and that will help you achieve the organization’s goals laid out in its strategic plans.
Writing your strategic plan
Now that you have your diagnosis, objectives, guiding policies, and actions, it’s time to put it all together into a coherent plan.
We’ll assume you already have your diagnosis, objectives, and guiding policies ready to go.
The next step is to develop what’s called an Implementation Matrix. This planning tool summarizes all the actions you want to take, who will be responsible for each action, and when you plan on completing each action.
An example Implementation Matrix might look like this:
| Action Item | Responsible Party | Timeline |
| Start Blog | Marketing | Jan 15 – Feb 15 |
| Publish 2x weekly | Marketing | Ongoing |
| Participate in online forums | Customer Support | Jan 15 – Mar 15 |
| Submit articles to industry journals | PR firm | April 15 – June 15 |
| Create LinkedIn posts | Sales | Feb 15 – June 15 |
As you can see, this document provides a clear overview of what actions need to be taken, who is responsible for each action, and when each action needs to be completed.
Now it’s time to turn this into an actual plan you can share with the rest of your organization.
There are a few different ways to format your plan. The important thing is that it’s easy to read and understand.
Here’s an example of one way you could format your strategic plan:
- Executive Summary: A high-level overview of the entire plan.
- Company Diagnosis: An analysis of the company’s current situation, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Objectives: The specific goals the company wants to achieve.
- Guiding Policies: The principles and policies that will guide decision-making in the company.
- Actions & Key Initiatives: A list of activities that need to be completed in order to achieve the objectives.
- Each action should include who is responsible for completing it, when it should be completed, key performance indicators, and what the budget is. Companies with a more advanced strategic management process may choose to add additional sections that define operational plans.
- Implementation Matrix: A summary of all the actions that need to be taken, who is responsible for each action, and when each action needs to be completed.
- Conclusion: A brief summary of the plan.
Step four: Communicate the heck out of your plan
The final step in creating your strategic plan is to make sure that everyone in the company is aware of it and knows what their role is.
The best way to do this is to have a company-wide meeting where you present the plan and answer any questions people might have.
You should also create a one-page document that outlines the main points of the plan and can be easily distributed to employees. This document should be posted in a prominent location so that everyone can reference it when needed. Ideally, you could also have a strategic plan dashboard like Viewshed to communicate progress towards the big goal and see how everything is coming together.
In addition, you should send out regular email updates about the status of the strategic plan and how each department is doing in terms of achieving its objectives. These updates will help keep everyone on track and accountable.
Now it’s your turn. Use the information in this article to create your own strategic plan. If you need help, there are plenty of resources out there, including books, templates, and online courses. And if you get stuck, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional strategic planner for help. Creating a strategic plan may seem like a lot of work, but it’s worth it. By taking the time to develop a comprehensive plan, you’ll set your business up for success.