Navigating the Future: 3 Things Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Planning for Growth

3 Things Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Planning for Growth

I’ll spare you the drama and cut right to the chase about strategic planning. It’s the cornerstone of success for any business. It’s the roadmap that guides your leadership team’s actions, decisions, and investments, helping you navigate through challenges, and capitalize on opportunities. 

Here’s where the challenge, or drama, begins. Many business owners overlook the importance of strategic planning or struggle to implement it effectively. So, in this blog, I’m going to uncover 3 things that every business owner needs to know about strategic planning. I’ll also give you some practical action steps and insights from my own leadership experience. I hope this energizes you to craft a robust plan for your next level of success.

3 Things to Know About Strategic Planning

1. It’s More Than Goal Setting

There are a lot of good goals that you could set. However, how do you know which ones to focus on? To keep your business goals focused it takes a strategic plan to align your business's vision with the goals. Then, and only then, will you be confident that your goals are the right goals and that you will stay true to why you started your business in the first place. 

Strategic planning involves analyzing your current position, assessing market trends, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and charting a course for the future. Think of it as a compass that guides you through the ever-changing landscape of business and keeps you from getting distracted.

Effective strategic planning offers numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. For example, it provides clarity and direction, aligns stakeholders towards common goals, enhances decision-making, and fosters a proactive rather than reactive approach to challenges. It also enables you to anticipate market shifts, capitalize on emerging trends, and stay ahead of the competition.

In my experience, trying to set goals without a vision is like trying to shoot a moving target. You have very little time to focus which causes you to feel rushed and unsure of what you are doing. It also creates a lot of anxiety and frustration because you are constantly readjusting to try to hit another target. The good news is that you don’t have to run your business this way despite what you feel like the business world is telling you. Strategic planning helps you keep your eye on the goal, be proactive in achieving the goal, along with staying ready to adapt to market changes as needed.

2. It Will Be Hard

I never liked “sugar coating” expectations. I believe it sets people up for failure. You need to know what something is going to be like so you can prepare yourself to persevere when it gets hard. Especially when it comes to the success of an organization. Leadership is hard and so is strategic planning. However, there is good news about it. The effort that you put into it will be so worth it and it will help make things so much easier in the long run. Not easy but easier and definitely more successful. 

So, be ready and don’t give up so that you don’t waste your time and resources to create a great strategic plan that doesn’t get finished or used. Most leaders will create a plan but then struggle to actually implement and execute the plan. Not to mention adapting it when challenges arise. 

One common challenge for organizations in creating a strategic plan is that leaders often underestimate the process's difficulty. So, they just default back to what’s easiest even though it’s not the best. In fact, as humans we do this all the time in our personal lives so it carries over into our business life as well. Strategic planning takes discipline!

This is where my coaching experience comes in. I coached college baseball and played professionally for several years and the common theme that I learned was that you need to establish a great game plan, prepare to execute it, but then be ready to adjust when the opposing team takes a different approach. Let’s face it, we know when our favorite sports team doesn’t have a good game plan. They play tentatively, without confidence and typically will get beat. Then, if it happens too many times in a season the Head Coach gets fired due to either incompetence or laziness. As a result there is a lot of planning and then accountability to execute the plan with excellence every day in practice and in the games. We need to take this same approach in our business! 

So, to overcome some of the common strategic planning hurdles, consider the following strategies:

1. Get the Team Involved: In other words, include key stakeholders, employees, managers, and external advisors, in the strategic planning process. Their insights and perspectives can offer valuable input and foster buy-in.
2. Flexibility and Adaptability: An effective strategic plan is not set in stone. The business landscape is dynamic, and plans will need to be adjusted to respond to changing market conditions or internal factors.
3. Regular Review and Evaluation: Schedule regular and different types of reviews of your strategic plan (Weekly, Quarterly, & Annually) to assess progress, identify obstacles, and make necessary adjustments. This ensures that your strategy remains relevant and effective and there are no surprises at the end of the year. 
4. Invest in Resources: Allocate sufficient resources, including time, budget, and talent, to support your strategic initiatives. This may involve investing in training, technology, or infrastructure to facilitate your plan’s implementation

3. It Will Grow Your Business

How can I be so certain that strategic planning will grow your business? Because whenever a group of people pull together and become intentional about working together for a common purpose the group’s efforts and results multiply. There are always fresh ideas, competition, and teamwork that will happen if the team is led and managed well. 

Now, you may not always hit your goals but you will grow further than when you started. For example, your gross revenue, your profit and your decision making all will grow stronger as a result of intentional planning and execution. Also, a strategic plan doesn’t guarantee that your business will never have any issues or down turns. But it does guarantee that your business will always be able to adapt, learn, and ultimately overcome challenges in some way. You will not be completely stuck and there will be hope as your team works together.

Key Components of an Effective Strategic Plan

As promised I wanted to give you some practical tips so that you can create the best strategic plan possible. Please keep in mind that each plan should be customized to each business’ personality and goals. However, there are some “must haves” that every strategic plan should include.

1. A Compelling Mission & Vision Statement: Defining your business's mission, purpose and long-term objectives are critical to motivate your team. Your vision statement should encapsulate where you aspire to be in the future, while your mission statement outlines how you'll achieve it. If these are not exciting enough then you will struggle to create a motivated and engaged workforce and ultimately a successful business.
2. Define Your Current State: List all your strengths, weaknesses and issues that stand in your way to accomplishing your mission and vision. This is Typically called a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats). Simply put, you can’t navigate to a new destination if you don’t know your current location. 
3. Goal Setting: It is critical to establish clear, measurable, and achievable goals that align with your vision and mission. The goals should be very specific and with a clear finish line and definition of success. A helpful way to do this is to create S.M.A.R.T. goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound). Once your goals are created then you will want to break them down into short-term (Weekly & Monthly) and long-term (Quarterly & Annually) objectives to track progress effectively. This way you will not come to the end of the year and wonder why the results are the way they are.
4. Accountability: Once you have a clear direction the last, but arguably the most difficult, part is to develop an accountable execution plan outlining the steps needed to achieve your goals. To do this you need to assign responsibilities to one person and set the expectations that they are to make weekly commitments to either complete the goal or “move the needle” towards completing the goal each week. In other words, they need to “take ownership” of their objective that is assigned.  Then, train your team members to set timelines, and their own key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the progress and to determine what success looks like for each goal. Finally, weekly meetings should be established with the expectation that everyone will give an update on the progress and be ready to be challenged (in a healthy way) if their commitments are not met. If this isn’t done well then your plan will not work!
   
   

Wrap-Up

Strategic planning is a critical process that empowers business owners to chart a course for success. There is no excuse why a business should not have a custom strategic plan and execution process. It’s simply irresponsible to not have one and a bad investment move. By not having a strategic plan you are cheating your business, your employees, and yourself. Also, one day you will want to sell your business for top dollar. However, if there is no strategic plan with specific processes to execute the plan then you will either not be able to sell your business or make a good profit from it. 

Consider your business like your home. If you don’t put the money and sweat into keeping it in top shape then you will not get “top dollar” for it when you want to sell it because the owner will have put a lot of money into it to get it up to their standards. There are plenty of people that want to buy “fixer upper” homes and businesses but they also want to buy them at “rock bottom” prices.

Hopefully you understand how important strategic planning is and will embrace the key components to overcome the challenges by taking consistent, accountable and actionable steps each day. If you do, then you will have a robust strategy that drives growth, innovation, and resilience in your business!

Remember, strategic planning is not a one-time event but an ongoing journey towards achieving your business's full potential.

Enjoy the Process!

Grow more. Risk Less

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