The Value of a Strategic Plan
In June of 1995, I joined a $9Million company that was losing 10% per year. I was part of team that was determined to turn it around. My job was to write the strategic plan. In July or 1998, we sold that company for $35Million.
We did that because of a 5 step strategy.
The same strategy can work in almost any situation of your business, career, even your life.
How to Build a Basic Strategy
We talk about strategies even in grade school, but rarely does anyone set out a solid common folks’ definition. So here’s one to start with.
Strategy is a dual-natured plan of action. It is a path based on an end goal that entertains and considers all of the information, conditions, and possibilities currently available to the strategist. It is also an ever-changing prediction of forward moving adjustments [tactics] delineated by the responses that occur at each step of the original strategic plan.
Working with strategy of any kind, it comes with the territory to know that, the minute a strategy is worked out, it is outdated. That’s because the information on which the strategy is based has already moved and changed. But to get started, here’s how to build a basic strategy.
-
1. Know your goal. If your goal is to add public speaking to your resume, that will direct your decisions and your timeline.
2. Define and visualize your goal as completely as possible. What kind of public speaking on what topics? on your own or with a company? speaking on ideas or for a product? Doing this will help you understand what you need to get where you want to be.
3. Define completely where you are now. Are there public speaking events in your skill set? Would people expect to see public speaking in your brochure or resume?
4. Find the gap between where you are and where you want to be.Do this in the most detailed manner. Name all of the pieces you are missing. Do you need more visibility? more training? more expertise? more knowledge? Get it — what’s missing — and introduce it slowly to your customers.
5. Arrange what you’re missing to plant seeds in fertile ground. Pick the one thing of what you’re missing that is closest to what you have. Maybe you’ve spoken before at a club or meeting. Extend that event and do more of that. People who are your clients or friends will expect to see that in your “catalogue of services.” They’ll perceive the change as a natural growth in a direction that makes sense.
6. Continue slowly adding skills for customers to access that move you closer to your vision. In essence, you are building your new persona as you build the market for it. Step-by-step you have moved your audience to a place where they now see you more and more as a person who also is a public speaker as well as what you were before.
PLUS ONE: Do it slowly and with purpose and adjust to the response your customers give you. If you add public speaker outright to your catalogue, you might be the best in the world, but people would never think to look to you for that skill.
By moving slowly you show them that they can expect to find such skills and talents in your offering.
It takes a few turns of the wheel longer, but your returns on the wheel of credibility and attention last and enhance your brand.
Strategy isn’t hard. We simply too often confuse it with tactics.
But that’s another post altogether.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Hi Liz (I’m thinking)
I can see that it’s a multidimentional task. The chances are that when we break it down, we actually have several distinct goals. And the strategies for each should be defined distinctly?
But somehow be organized in such a way that we can work on multiple goals/strategies at the same time?
Hi Katie,
The main goal what sets your strategy. What is it what you want to see? What is your vision?
Is it you in a certain job? What skills do you need to get there? What skills do you have already? How can you expand and redefine what you have?
Then how can you add one thing that is close to what you have, but on the way to where you want to be?
(I haven’t abandoned this — I’m off thinking….be back soon with more to say….)
No worries. 🙂
Liz, I think a lot of people get tripped up right at point number 1. Truth be told, most people don’t know what they really want.
Or, if they have actually thought about it for a moment or two they may put some vague label on it like “success” or “a better job” or “more money.”
Then they go blasting on to the next steps.
But until that desire is shaped into a well defined tangible goal, the rest of what we do is only so much futility.
Chris,
Now that I’ve fixed the typos, left from a fleeing to a breakfast meeting. . . .
You’re right. So right. I think we overwhelm ourselves sometimes. When it comes to stuff like strategy I think we all think TOO BIG.
Defining the end goal is what we mean when we say vision. It’s the picture of what we want. It doesn’t and in fact shouldn’t be such a BIG thing. It should be the definable next thing we want.
Maybe it’s the next job, or the next version of a product line, or our career. Then we can plan the steps to get there. But we overwhelm ourselves when we make the leap too large and try to make it a “millionaire’s leap.”
Liz,
Another thing is the goal has to be believable for us to stop procrastinating and start doing.
But, one of the most common problems is that just as we started to set goals, immediately at the same time objections occur.
Sigh. “I will never have the guts to speak in front of people.” — that kind of thing.
I particularly use Byron Katie’s The Work to overcome this.
Just curious, anyone has this problem? What do you use to overcome it?
Yeah. I know what you mean. Personally I struggle at this very point. My tendency is to “think big” and set some lofty goal.
But then it has often happened that my perfectionist self takes over and tries to plan it out to the Nth degree. He doesn’t wan to move forward until everything is planned out. The result can be that no action is taken and I never move at all.
Hendry and Chris,
You both seem to be saying the same thing really, and I know exactly what you mean, because I’ve been there. In fact, I would say this could be a goal optimists have to work on everyday when you’re talking about personal goals.
Strategy is easier on a business playing field.
Hendry
Welcome,
To answer your question about making the goal believable and then talking ourselves out it, I’m going to be writing more about strategy later this week . . .
But the short answer for me works like this. I know that when I choose a goal that I can’t believe in I soon start to feeling badly about myself. So if it’s personal goals, or business goals you’re talking about, they have to be grounded in what resources already exist or what resources are in the plan to acquire.
The goal of speaking in public becomes believable when you add “I’m going to be taking a class and working with a mentor/coach.”
Think of this post as the overview. There’s a lot to talk about when the subject is strategy and hardly anyone knows what it is.
You’re not a stranger anymore, Hendry. You’re a friend now. Hope you’ll be back to talk more about it.