Resources for Strategic Planning

Business Guide to Strategic Planning

Developing a strategic plan requires you to outline your company’s mission, values and goals. When these aspects of your business are clearly defined, managers and employees have a full understanding of what they are contributing to. Strategic planning also helps to boost productivity within your organization. Many employees have no understanding of what they are contributing to when they perform their jobs. Strategic planning encourages employees to reflect on company goals when making important decisions.  Employees are also likely to work harder when they understand how their jobs contribute to your organization. Strategic planning continuously reinforces the fact that each member of your company is valuable, which greatly benefits your entire organization.

Benefits

Strategic planning helps you devise a guide to help you meet your business goals. This management tool can help your employees work toward essential objectives and clarify the desired trajectory of your business.

Greater profits

Strategic planning allows you to increase your company's future profits. By clarifying the company’s goals, management can find more opportunities to expand your bottom line. Strategic planning can also help your managing team put new projects into motion to meet larger goals.

Craft a usable business plan

Most businesses that have failed did not have a written business plan. Even if your business had a plan when it first started up, you may find that your plan has become outdated. Strategic planning encourages your management team to analyze your current strategies and plans by examining past data. From these results, you can set a strategic direction for your business. The strategic direction allows your team to develop a workable business plan based on your company's vision, values, and mission statement.

Integrate budgeting with goals

Linking budgeting and future goals can help your business advantageously allocate your monetary resources. According to Erica Olsen, author of Strategic Planning for Dummies, only 40 percent of businesses link budgeting with strategy.

Once your business goals are set, you can easily evaluate each item of your budget by deciding if it helps you achieve a key business objective. Using strategic planning to link budgeting and goals can also be helpful as you increase profits. By consulting your future business objectives, you'll know exactly where you should increase your company's budget.

Encourage action

Unlike traditional goal setting, action planning is an integral part of strategic planning. Action planning requires specific time lines to reach planned objectives. Each manager should also have a clear set of responsibilities to achieve your company's goals. Regular monitoring of your current plan and evaluating your company's progress will also ensure your company is advancing toward your goals. 

Olsen notes that 95 percent of the typical workforce doesn't understand its company’s strategy. When you set a plan and encourage action, your employees will be more invested in your company's future.

Pitfalls

Ensure correct application of human resources

Everyone involved with the company will likely wish to have their say in the strategic planning process. Try to focus time and resource expenditure on the key players involved with the final result. It is easy to get too many voices involved in a project and end up drowning out the mangers, team leaders and other employees that most need to be heard. Many employees may resent being taken from their work to participate in unrelated planning sessions. Also, labor costs increase whenever employees must be taken from their current work to attend strategic planning meetings.

Watch out for unexpected costs

Labor costs may not be the only consideration when it comes to revenue loss from extended planning. Use of facilities, the board rooms or gathering areas where meetings take place, may also increase costs. Project organization, consultancy with outside experts, materials used in the planning process and the compilation or dissemination of information discovered during the planning process may all incur additional costs for the business. These can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars and are compounded if they take resources from other areas of your business.

Don’t get stuck in planning mode

Each hour spent in planning takes resources away from the company and can rack up the aforementioned costs. Try to focus your planning around very specific goals and benchmarks, or else the process of continual improvement can turn into a continual feedback loop. Getting stuck in planning mode slows the results gained from strategic planning by interfering with implementation time. Plans should be determined during the initial process and enacted as soon as the strategy is formed. It is recommended to set specific beginning and evaluation dates for implementation. This allows the company to benchmark results without the need for unnecessary additional planning sessions.

Pricing

Strategic planning determines what your organization will be doing over the next year and how you plan to achieve your company’s goals.

Strategic Pricing

According to ezinearticles.com, research in regards to your strategic plan can make up 70 to 80 percent of the time a planning organization takes to produce a strategic plan for your company. The actual price per hour of these organizations varies depending on the type of consultant you work with. Some will charge based on the number of employees you maintain, while others charge based on your rate of growth. It is best to negotiate a contract with the business you want to work with, since some can charge upwards of $8,000 for their time, while others charge more or less.

Conclusion

In order for your business to grow, it is important for every member of your organization to share the same company outlook. With a strategic plan in place, workers are less likely to waste time during work hours because they know that they will be held accountable for their job performance. Your employees will also put more effort into their work because they know that they will be held accountable for it. The most important reason why you need a strategic plan in place is because it continually reinforces the goals you have for your company to your workers, which encourages each of your employees to take more pride in their jobs.