Strategic Planning

Coupled with having a strategy, having a plan or process to effectively plan strategically is a key ingredient to business growth and success. 

A common theme we work with our clients is about being intentional in their strategy. And in this aspect there should be reason to be any different. Clearly delegating time to think/plan is a great business habit to have, but unfortunately is something that doesn’t often happen. 

In our experience in order to ensure it is effective and not a waste of hours for senior members of your team there are a number of key aspects to consider about strategic planning.  

Firstly who should be involved? 

For startups and solopreneurs there often isn’t anybody else that can be involved other than the founder. But invariably these people will consult or seek the confidence of peers, family and friends in an informal way. Becoming intentional on this process, be it formalising it, or bringing in an external advisor would be a great next step. 

For more mature businesses with senior management teams, being clear on who would be involved in those conversations and ensuring you’re gathering input from anyone not involved is a key step. Having a dedicated person to facilitate more formal strategic conversations is also a great tip, be it a founder, a senior member of the team, or a third party. 

The second and maybe most important aspect is what should be discussed?

This is sometimes the most difficult question to answer, not least if there are sensitive subjects that need to be covered. But again there are a number of core things that we would expect to see from high performing business. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) 

Defining and monitoring KPIs, like win rates and profitability should be an important regular aspect of running a business. But it is important to have a clear handle of any relevant trends or themes when doing any form of strategic planning. 

Objectives/goals 

There are a number of methods/frameworks but the Objective, Key Result (OKR) methodology made famous at places like Google is a good place to start. The key here is ensuring these are not a laundry list of “to-dos.” These should be core strategic goals that you as a business are trying to achieve in a certain timeframe. 

Using the SMART methodology for objectives is a good way to sense check these at any given time. Is the objective Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound?

Strategic initiatives 

For more mature businesses often there will be larger initiatives that are cross functional and will require objectives across departments and teams. Clearly defining these and ensuring you have a way to manage and monitor progress on these is key to avoiding them turning into massive projects that are distracting and time intensive. And being very specific on what the scope of the initiative is will often be the difference between a success and failure. Scope creep on initiatives like these is inevitable, so being clear on what you are going to and what you are going to park, or ignore is a tough but important exercise.  

The last aspect to this is How/When you will monitor progress?

As a rule of thumb we believe doing a quarterly strategic review is an important best practice. In those sessions it is key to discuss progress of the previous quarter in terms of KPIs, objectives and initiatives, but also to define what your business is aiming to achieve in the following quarter. 

Annual planning is a big part of this too, and ensuring you take time to put together an annual and even three-to-five year plan is very important in providing a guide to where your business is headed. A key point to this is that a financial budget is not an annual plan - ensuring you build your annual plan/strategy first, and then translate it into a financial budget is something a large majority of businesses don’t do. 

Finally, how often and when you are updating on progress is important to make sure you are on track and where needed you can course correct. Having regular updates on KPIs potentially via a balanced scorecard is a good starting point, but getting qualitative updates on objectives and initiatives is important. This can take the form of monthly management/board meetings or updates via various project/strategic planning tools. But the key with this as with all of the above is clearly deciding on how to proceed. 

To conclude there are four key tips that we think are important to take into account when implementing any type of strategic planning process or framework. 

1. Fluidity/flexibility; there is no one size fits all to strategic planning. Implementing a framework and a way of operating and iterating is the best way forward.

   
   

2. Prioritisation; if these sessions are effective there will invariably be no shortage of ideas. Prioritising these and being clear on what you’re not going to focus on, even if it’s deferring them to another quarter will help you focus and deliver more. 

   
   

3. Buy-in/validation; getting buy-in from the board/senior management or validation from external support is key to successfully delivering your objectives as a team. Ensuring the right people are involved as early as possible will go a long way in getting buy-in and validation.

   
   

4. Regular updating/course correcting; ensuring your annual or quarterly strategy isn’t just an exercise that then never gets looked at again is very important. Ensuring you’re regular sense checking progress and challenging if your strategy is accurate is key. This loops back to the first point as if things aren’t going in the right direction, being fluid based on external and internal factors could be the difference between succeeding and failing.