Strategic Planning

Where is your company today? Where would you like to be 3—5 years from now? How will you get there?

In our 20 years of providing strategic planning facilitation to help companies to grow profitably, we’ve seen three common strategic planning pitfalls:

1.	Putting it off
	Especially in smaller and mid-sized firms, people are often too caught up working in the business to step back and work on the business. But taking time to see the big picture is critical to long-term success. A strategic planning facilitator can help to give you needed perspective.
2.	Planning only from the top down
	To succeed, any strategy must have the buy-in of those responsible for implementing it.
3.	Letting the strategic plan gather dust
	Quick … where’s your copy of your company’s strategic plan? If it’s gathering dust on a shelf, there’s a problem with your process. Strategy development must be more than platitudes on paper—and more frequent than an every-three-years event. A strategic planning consultant can help motivate you to stay on track.

10 Ways to Improve Your Strategic Planning Process. Click here.

As early as possible, involve the people responsible for implementing the strategy in the planning process. Utilize an experienced strategic planning facilitator to guide your team.
After assessing internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats, define your long-range (3—5 year) vision.
Focus on actions that will make your firm’s services more valuable to clients than those of your competitors.
Remember that improving the competitiveness of your core business will typically yield a much higher return on investment than launching new services or entering new markets.
Set specific 12-month goals and quarterly objectives.
Spend roughly 20% of your planning time setting goals and 80% defining how you will achieve them. Clearly designate who will do what by when.
Charge each individual practice group with responsibility to develop its own strategy and action plan—with senior management guidance.
Assign your strategic planning consultant to conduct quarterly follow-up meetings to assess progress and make course corrections.
Create a marketing strategy that flows from your strategic plan and aligns with operational capacities.
Remember that circumstances shift over time. Build a management structure responsive to ongoing change.

For assistance with strategic planning facilitation or more on this topic, we invite you to Connect With Us.