Strategic planning is one of those business buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot, but new entrepreneurs are a bit wary of. With the trending use of quick-thinking tools such as Lean Canvas, the idea of spending hours planning the next 1-5 years of your business life might seem like a thing of the past. But the practice is still alive and well. What is dwindling, however, is the frequency with which businesses are engaging in the practice of strategic growth planning in 2019.
It’s time for a revival. Here’s how you can create a strategic growth plan for 2019 that you can come back to again and again.
Start with the Basics
As the old saying goes, you can’t get where you are going until you know where you have been. Take time to look at what has been working and what hasn’t been working. Nobody said it was going to be an easy process or fun one for that matter, but it is a necessary process to ensure that your business is headed down the right road. Think of it like retracing your steps if you’ve lost something in your home.
By remembering where you were and how you spent your time, you’ll be able to see your results and find your way in the future. Making notes, regardless of how you actually document them, is important. Whether you decide to write a formal report or use an oversized chart paper, write down what you have learned in going back to the basics.
Write Out the Big Picture
Once you’ve seen the past from a new perspective and are confident in what has happened so far, take time to think about where the next road leads. Think about things as if they were absolute and guaranteed to happen. What happens if everything works out? What happens if you are successful? What happens if you reach your revenue goals? How does the company operate from a high-level perspective?
Don’t get lost in the day-to-day operations at this point. That’s tactics. The strategy is a big picture. Whether you spend time negotiating with high-powered executives or you are traveling the globe to promote your business, make sure you write it all down.
Timelines are Everything
One of the key factors of a strategic growth plan is timings. You need to set parameters around your goals and objectives so that you don’t lose sight of where you are going. If you have four years to reach a goal, you’ll wait three and a half years to start. Rather than put off actions and tactics that can help you achieve your strategies, start with smaller timelines like six, eight and twelve months and see how the outcomes of those timelines feed into bigger five to ten-year goals.
Check-In
Strategic planning is about so much more than just spending one afternoon writing down everything you want your business to achieve in the next few years. It requires a constant finger-on-the-pulse appreciation and approach and if your planning stops immediately following your planning session, you run the risk of failure.
By revisiting your strategic plan from time to time, say every quarter, you get to adjust and adjust on the fly. If something isn’t working, you don’t need to wait a year to find out that your plan had you going down the wrong path.
Gather your team and perform check-ins from time to time to see how things are going. If you work alone or have a small team, you should get in the habit of taking time each quarter to dedicate to the growth and reassessment of your business strategies. Nobody is going to do it for you.
Test Your Theories
As part of your strategic plan, you are going to make a number of assumptions and you are going to make decisions based on your best guesses at the time. You can’t know how things are going to go, but you can guess. If you make educated guesses about business growth, be sure to adjust your numbers as you test your theories along the way.
If you suspected that client A was going to come back for another 4 quarters and has dropped off the face of the map, what happens now? You don’t need to have a Doomsday contingency, although that is not always a bad idea, you should have a plan for if things go belly up at some point or you lose your biggest client to the competition.