When it comes to growing your business, it’s essential to start with strategy!
Turning your vision into a strategic plan is not only deeply rewarding but essential in today’s dynamic and competitive global marketplace. As JFK famously said “efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction”.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, time consuming or expensive, but taking the time to develop and write down where you want your business to go is rich in proven benefits. The very process of reviewing your market, business and opportunities, articulating your priorities and embedding them in the business creates a clear pathway to profitable, sustainable growth.
A business strategy is essentially a considered, intentional plan that outlines how your organisation will create value for the people who matter most: your owners, your employees, your customers, and other key stakeholders.
But it doesn’t stop there. A strong strategy also reflects your bigger picture — your vision for the future and the long-term goals you’re working towards. It helps clarify your place in the market by defining your unique position, and articulates your competitive advantage or what sets you apart from competitors and potential challengers. It guides decisions about where to focus time, energy, and resources, helping your team stay aligned and motivated.
In short, an organisation’s strategy is the bridge between your ambitions and your day-to-day actions. It brings clarity to complexity and gives your business a sense of direction so that everyone moves in the same intended direction.
While best practice is to develop a full strategic plan every three years and review it annually, in our experience it’s also worth developing, updating or revising your plan at the start of the year before you allocate resources and set your objectives and organisational priorities.
Here are our top reasons why starting with strategy is essential to every business:
- Strategic planning allows you to step back from the day to day running of the business. It’s so easy to focus on operational issues and the day to day demands that come with running a business. Investing time in strategic planning will enable you to lift your head up to work on medium and long term plans and identify new opportunities and ideas that may not even be on your radar.
- It’s the perfect time to set a clear direction and recalibrate if needed. Whether your business is growing and scaling up or there are underlying challenges, the process of setting your strategic priorities will help to clarify your key challenges and shape plans that, improve profitability, accelerate growth or assist your turnaround.
- Clarifying your positioning. It’s so easy for your positioning to become diluted, but it pays to be clear on what you stand for, and what you don’t. By ensuring you have a strong understanding of your market, business and customers, you can establish a powerful, compelling and differentiated positioning and offers to maximise consumer appeal and stand out from competitors and challengers.
- Define your focus. It’s a true-ism that you can’t be all things to all people. Creating a clear strategic plan will help to define your focus and priorities for key stakeholders and employees. Identifying the most important ‘jobs to be done’ often involves tough conversations – and honest assessments of what is the most important to your business, and the activities and messaging that’s most likely to move the needle with clients, customers or consumers.
- Blueprint for decision making. It can be so easy to get bogged down in the minutia of small everyday decisions that come with running a business. Having a strategic plan makes all those little decisions easier! When you’re considering innovation, communication, consumer messaging and even investment in new systems, people and initiatives, checking that your short-term actions are aligned to the company’s vision or is ‘on strategy’ can make those decisions clearer and help ensure you stay on the right track to delivering on your business vision.
We see the impact of clear and compelling strategic plans on business results every single day.
It’s not just the strategic planning process which is crucial. Management studies since the 1970s have consistently shown that people are 50-80% more likely to reach and exceed their financial and productivity goals when they’re written down. Why? Because you’ll be more committed to a plan that you’ve taken the time to get onto paper; it’s likely to be more clearly articulated or crafted; you will be better positioned to make decisions and allocate resources in line with your vision if it’s top of mind; and of course it will help to keep you focused on the bigger picture through everything that you do. In fact, at BlueFish Strategic Planning and Marketing we develop a ‘Plan on a Page’ for that very reason. It becomes a very visible, clear daily reminder of your strategic priorities, ambitions and goals.
Read more articles, winning tips and latest best practice here, or get in touch with Sarah via [email protected] to see how we can help develop a winning strategy for your business.
