Is your business in a rut? Maybe it’s time for a business strategy makeover.
Remember the excitement and challenges when you started your business? Over time, growth might have plateaued, competition stiffened, and profit margins tightened. Despite great ideas and a strong team, reaching the next level may seem elusive. Let’s outline how strategic planning can help rejuvenate your business, boost growth, and increase profitability.
What is Strategy?
Strategy is your plan to build revenues and profits in your current economic environment. It defines what you plan to sell, who you plan to sell it to, and how you plan to do it.
It’s akin to sailing; your strategic plan helps your team navigate unpredictable conditions effectively, ensuring everyone knows the overall goal and can make sound decisions even when things change. Without a strategy, you are just one of the many boats in the ocean with no plan to get to any destination, and no way to avoid disaster.
But first you need to decide on your destination and your ideal path to that destination. We call this your mission and vision.
Mission Vs. Vision
Businesses often confuse mission and vision statements. A clear distinction is crucial:
- Mission Statement: Clearly states what your business does, how it operates, whom it serves, and the value it delivers today.
- Vision Statement: Describes the desired future state of your business.
For example, Apple’s mission focuses on delivering innovative products and services, while its vision is to produce the best products and positively impact the world. These statements guide decisions at all business levels, ensuring alignment and consistency.
Before you get into the details of your strategy, it is vital to determine your business’s ideal future state (vision) and an overall statement of purpose on how you intend to achieve your vision (e.g. your mission).
Then its time to get to work identifying the elements that can help and harm you in fulfilling your mission. This is your SWOT analysis.
SWOT Analysis: The Starting Point
The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis helps clarify your strategic focus:
- Strengths: Processes, assets, or people currently benefiting your business that can help your strategy succeed.
- Weaknesses: Areas performing poorly, negatively impacting your business that you need to improve or mitigate.
- Opportunities: External factors or market conditions offering potential growth.
- Threats: External factors that could hinder or negatively impact your business.
A thorough SWOT analysis provides clarity, allowing your team to leverage strengths, address weaknesses, exploit opportunities, and mitigate threats effectively.
Too often, we see firms do a great SWOT analysis but can’t get to the next step of creating and implementing a workable strategy.
Moving from SWOT to Strategy
Once you’ve completed your SWOT analysis, evaluate whether your current mission aligns with market opportunities and internal capabilities and determine if adjustments are required:
- Ensure your mission statement clearly addresses market needs.
- Verify if your strengths adequately support capturing market opportunities and combating threats.
- Establish if your mission effectively moves you towards your vision.
- List the core business activities you need to do in order to achieve your mission. Ensure these align with your SWOT analysis and the mission and vision.
- Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that monitor your progress towards achieving your mission and vision.
If your mission and vision are aligned with the market and your strengths will allow your to succeed its time to focus on improving your operational processes to ensure your can deliver on the strategy. If misalignment is identified, use your SWOT analysis to determine if you need to change your operations or adjust your mission and vision.
Note that you might need to iterate the mission and vision, SWOT, and the core activities of your business several times to achieve the desired alignment of all elements.
Strategy Requires Tactical Agility
Remember, strategy is your guiding star—not a rigid plan. Just as sailors adjust tactics in response to changing conditions without losing sight of their destination, your business must remain flexible, making tactical adjustments as necessary. Be prepared to adjust equipment, methods, and even the overall strategy if the environment changes.
Ready for a Strategic Makeover? DTMG is here to help.
Creating and implementing a new strategy to grow your business can be complex and time-consuming if you are uncertain how to go about the process.
We can help you by providing strategic planning support, business advisory, and implementation services to get you moving in the right direction.
