We leverage commercial best practices to help our clients reinvent their strategic planning processes. Our job is to help provoke questions and facilitate conversations rather than just create documents, we help you to rely on facts to make key decisions, and involve those expected to implement the strategy in the planning process.
The central purpose of this process is to assure that the course and direction is well-thought-out, sound and appropriate and to assure that the limited resources of the enterprise (time and capital) are sharply focused in support of that course and direction. The process encompasses both strategy formulation and implementation.
Distinct Ways To Help You
STRATEGIC PLANNING DEVELOPMENT:
A. We can utilizing your already established planning system, help you run meetings, create documentation, and fine tune the process
B. Bringing in outside methods (Industry Best Practices or Our Proprietary "Business Model Strategy Approach")
C. Introducing a Hybrid combing how you have done things in the past while infusing best practice strategic planning tools & methods where appropriate
Strategic planning is one of the most important responsibilities of the senior management of an organization. It is the vehicle that senior management should use to set the organizational vision, determine the strategies required to achieve that vision, make the resource deployment decisions to achieve the selected strategies, and build alignment to the vision and strategic direction throughout all levels of the organization.
Unfortunately, strategic planning is also one of the most misunderstood and poorly used tools in many organizations. Strategic plans are often large documents with detailed plans created arduously over months at great effort...only to gather dust and languish after they have been acknowledged and then filed away.
INDUSTRY BEST PRACTICES:
Utilizing today's industry best practices, the work product (the strategic plan) is a tightly developed, concise document that can then be shared with a Board and with the employees of an organization. This work product (without the high level implementation plan) should generally not require more than 3-8 pages, and consists of the following:
- SWOT analysis (Assessment of current business environment)
- Vision
- Mission (may also include core values)
- Critical success factors
- Overall organizational performance measures
- Core Strategies
- Performance measures for each strategy
- Major resource deployment decisions
- Assignment of strategic responsibilities
- High level macro implementation schedule
- Monitoring and control system
PROPRIETARY BUSINESS MODEL STRATEGY APPROACH:
Outside of today's standard business practices, Strategy Makers LLC can incorporate a proprietary strategic planning methodology that concentrates on the overall business model structures of the firm or group involved.
This provides a much more critical look at overall business practices both on the revenue and expense side that standard strategic planning tends to avoid. The basic principals of this approach is to challenge the prevailing business model utilizing competitive analysis and alternative scenarios.
This method brings creates "out of the box thinking" that many executives would like to see but are to close to established ways of doing business to challenge that they could be done differently (can’t see the forest for the trees).
Why use this approach?
What Has Worked in the Past Probably Won't Work in the Future
In order to do more than merely survive, many firms must:
- Completely reexamine thier basic business model
- Reconsider their product offerings and target markets
- Explore repositioning their offerings
- Reconsider the financial, physical and organizational structure of their business.