These Strategic Planning Steps Will Ensure That Your Company Scales Up
Growth is a common aim across most businesses; however, you will need to scale up your operations to achieve it.
While your business’s aim might be the same as others, you are still a unique organization, and you’ll face different challenges along your way. How do you achieve success in your business growth?
Your business needs a roadmap to success. This can come in the form of a strategic plan.
In this article, we’ll discuss the strategic planning steps that will ensure your company scales up.
What Is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is a fundamental process that you need to undertake to establish the future direction of your small business.
A company strategic plan takes into account where you are currently and where you want to get to. Your strategic plan will allow you to record your vision, values, and mission. A strategic plan lets you set longer-term goals and action plans to help you achieve them.
If your strategic plan is well-written and thorough, it will be a central part of your business’s growth and development.
Your strategic plan will be the blueprint, which will allow your employees to know how they should react to the challenges that they might face along the way.
There are several key benefits that you will derive from your strategic planning process.
As a business owner, you’ll develop a better understanding of your business objectives while employees will increase productivity because they’ll feel like they’re contributing to the company’s growth.
What Considerations Need to Be Made in the Strategic Planning Process?
There are several areas of consideration that need to be addressed when carrying out strategic planning. You will need to take steps to look at the internal workings of the company, as well as how your business is perceived from the outside.
Here are the steps that you should take in your strategic planning process.
Engage With Your Employees
Your strategic plan will involve and affect your employees. Because your employees play such a key role in everyday operations, they understand how your business works from the inside. Often, this perspective is overlooked or taken for granted; however, it can be valuable.
Encourage your employees to share their thoughts on what they think about the current processes and what they would like to see changed. This can be useful in informing your strategic planning for the future.
Pinpoint Your Strengths and Weaknesses
It is essential that as a part of your strategic planning process, you deconstruct your past and current performance. Look at everything that your business does well at the moment, and identify the areas that would benefit from some improvement.
By identifying and admitting your weaknesses, you’ll be able to set goals that aim to improve on these while working to safeguard your existing strengths.
Do remember to listen to the feedback from others regarding your weaknesses. This should include customer feedback as well as the opinions of your employees and suppliers.
Identify Opportunities and Threats
Once you have looked at your business’s internal strengths and weaknesses, it is time to take a look outside. Identifying the opportunities will take some market research.
You may want to carry out some research to understand your current level of market penetration. Understanding where you sit in the market is an excellent way to work out how far you can go.
Once you have identified the opportunities within the market, you need to address the threats. Evaluate the current state of the market. Who are your current competitors? What are they doing that is different from you? Are you seeing a rise in the competition coming from unconventional places?
By evaluating all threats, you will be able to start thinking about creative ways that you can proactively combat them.
Develop an Action Plan
Having carried out a full assessment of your current performance and taken in information from all of your sources, you can set to work on your action plan.
Each goal should be clearly structured and should always include:
- What you want to achieve
- When you want to achieve it
- How you will achieve it
- Who you want to be involved
All of your objectives in your action plan should be SMART. That is, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
Putting Your Strategic Planning Steps Into Action
Once you have gone through the strategic planning process, you will start putting your steps into action.
One of the first steps that you should take is to introduce your plans to your employees. Remind them of their contribution and talk about how the new plans will benefit them in their roles.
Be clear about how you will implement all of the objectives.
Then, when you can do so, start to implement the changes pragmatically.
Put Your Digital Growth in Our Hands
If you’re looking to grow your business, you don’t need to struggle to do it all by yourself. While you create the strategic planning steps that you’ll use to take your business to the next level, Solid Digital can assist you.
We’ll work alongside you to implement your marketing strategy and make sure that you are following the details in your strategic plan.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help your business meet its strategic growth objectives.
