5 Actionable Strategic-Planning Tips To Boost Business Efficiency
For every business, whether large or small, being able to plan effectively is crucial for growth and survival in today's highly competitive markets. When it comes to strategic planning for your business, there are several things you'll need to keep in consideration to ensure success and profitability, starting with these formative five.
1. Set Granular Goals
Business plans should be long term goals and objectives, whereas, a Strategic Plan is short term goals and objectives broken down step by step so as to be able to see what needs to be done on a day to day basis. With that being said, to achieve this, each team member should be given a fixed task so as to guarantee success.
2. Set Metric & Track Religiously
After setting detailed goals, the next step is to choose the method you’ll use to monitor progress. Emphasis should be placed on Sales, Customer Engagement and Referral Rates as they reflect long term success as opposed to say, web traffic.
Monitor all aspect of methods being use to track the growth of your business, to ensure you are not working with inaccurate, incomplete or outdated data. Monitor each method used so as to be able to tweak (as need arises) your Strategic Plan over time.
3. Working With a Mentor
Having an expert mentor is vital in business, influencing everything from hiring success, sales and profit to staff turnover. Accomplished names such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey have all attested to having a mentor to seek advice during trying times ad key to their success.
According to a top business-consulting coach with My Success Team Braxton Yoeman "You'll be able to tap from their wealth of experience, sidestep mistakes and make important decisions by relying on their knowledge of how things work" Your mentor should be someone preferably in your line of business but not necessarily so, as most small business span across industries.
4. Take Your Team Along and Involve Everyone
Basically this means making everyone privy to the necessary steps needed for success and how their individual input affects the "big picture". This usually garners instant motivation. " I matter". Frequent meetings should be held to keep everyone abreast of what needs to be done.
5. Keep It Flexible
Due to advancement of technological innovation, strategic plans from a few years ago will likely need to be updated while though challenging, can be seen as an opportunity to take advantage of innovations that occurs later on. If the plan is too inflexible you will find it difficult to change. That way you'll stay ahead of the curve and your competitors in innovation and profitability.
