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Strategic planning is essentially making the tough decisions on where to invest your business’s resources (money…staff time… staff focus… customer attention…etc.) and where you WON’T invest your business’s resources. Here are ten tips to do it better.
In other words, what one limitation is currently doing the most to limit the growth and success of your business? Getting clear on your limiting factor is one of your top leverage points inside of your business.
Again, this is the challenge worth solving. When you do solve it, you automatically grow your business in a leveraged way!
That means that the solution is either easy to implement or has a high likelihood of working.
A home run is a solution that if it works, the payoff is BIG!
Going back to your above list of 10 solutions to each of your limiting factors, circle the solutions that are both a low hanging fruit and a home run. These are your “sweet spots”. By definition these are the critical areas you need to invest the best resources inside your business. They are easy to do/high likelihood of working and they have a BIG payoff.
Too many business owners never stop and clarify in writing the business they are working so hard to create. What does your ideal business look like in 3-5 years? What does it look like quantitatively? (E.g. What are its sales figures… its market share… its margins… the size of the average client… etc.) What does it look like qualitatively? (E.g. What is it known for… what niches does it focus on… who are its best customers… what does the team look like… etc.)
If you are working to build a $5 million per year sales volume in the next 5 years, what number do you need to hit in 4 years? 3 years? Etc. Then ask what steps you need to take to reach each of your sub-goals/milestones along the way.
Use the “sweet spot” technique I just shared to identify the highest leverage solutions to implement first.
How can you hold yourself or others accountable if you don’t clearly articulate what each of you is responsible for.
What are your top three strategic results you are looking to accomplish each quarter? There is a reason why I counsel business owners to pick a maximum of 3 strategic focuses each quarter on their quarterly plan of action – any more would split their efforts and lead to overwhelm, and overwhelm leads to inaction or unfocused action. Be realistic as to what you can in fact do as a business each quarter. But be relentless in the discipline of creating your clarified action plan each and every quarter.
I hope these ideas help you take what you’ve accomplished so far in 2014 and invest them into making 2015 even better.
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