• Helps the organization to stay on the course of its long-term objectives, mission, and values, not to mention determine its own performance trajectory over time.
• Protects organizations from executing outside their missions hence enabling them to perform to their maximum potential.
• It helps set the direction of your company and create goals to aim towards. Without a business strategy, you are not clear on where your business is going, and it is unlikely you will get to where you want it to be while having one in place increases your chance of getting there.
• Helps you avoid competitive convergence by introducing a unique differentiation that sets you apart from your competitors.
• It helps you identify your milestones against your targets making it easier for you to know how far you have come, how far you need to go, the resources you will need, and the costs involved.
• It will give you and your team the drive and impetus to perform at your best and take the business to where you want it to be.
• Helps uncover customer segments, market conditions, buyer behavior, and product and service offerings that are in the best interest of your firm helping you direct efforts in the right direction, hence increasing profitability.

• Your business lacks objectives hence not having a clear vision of which direction to go in the future.
• It makes it difficult for you to create budgets for special projects and understand the personnel and funding resources required to launch new products to grow the business.
• Your company is denied a defined chain of command structure since it is not clearly written.
  The growth of your organization is slowed down since there is no order, and that aimlessness negatively affects the morale of your team.
• You don’t have a way to measure your business’s success.

But how do you set about creating a strategy or a strategic plan? Let’s spend a little time exploring that:

Outlined below are the steps to follow to develop a good business strategy

• Set strategic objectives – The first step is to set the goals the organization aspires to for the Strategic Plan period. These are drawn from the organizational vision but cover a shorter time horizon and must be aligned with the organization’s core values. Strategic objectives could spell out anything from the launch of a new product, increasing profitability, or growing market share for the company’s product, as examples.
• Perform a strategic audit –Once the objectives are clearly identified, the next step is to determine where the organization and its environments are at. A so-called strategic audit involves applying analytical tools to determine where the firm is at. One of the popular tools for this step is the SWOT analysis but there are others.
• Define the firm’s business model– The next step is to identify a configuration of plans, capabilities, processes, and identified priorities that will create value on a sustainable basis, a de facto source of competitive advantage. This should include market segments and the capabilities required to do them. Examples of sources of competitive advantage could include any or a combination of uniquely skilled personnel, a unique geographic location, brand recognition, or a unique or wide variety of products or services.
• Generate strategic options – A business model opens a doorway to a variety of actions and approaches. Within a particular business model, there are therefore still choices to be made. The next step involves explicitly those choices and listing them down – tools such as the BCG Matrix (used for category prioritization) are the most popular in this step of the strategic planning process. There are other valuable tools for this that will help you make choices around the multiple dimensions that arise – these depend on specific business configurations and the determination of their usefulness depending on business specifics.
• Resource allocation – At this stage, resources are allocated to the choices made in point d) above towards delivering the profit model defined in point c). Examples of resources include funds, facilities, equipment, materials, supplies, and manpower.
• Implement, measure, and triangulate – it’s at this stage that laid-out plans are put into action to accomplish the desired results. Measurement is important as it helps track the company’s output, evaluating how it is performing in relation to the targets that were set prior to the launch of the strategy. Triangulation helps use multiple approaches to analyze and enhance the performance of the strategy.

At Stratex, we recognize the value addition of creating a strategic plan and defining a strategy for your business. We are available for your consultation to help you walk through the strategic planning process, and even to craft missions, vision, and values for your organization as a prerequisite to the strategic planning process, and then to empower you to think and act strategically as you drive your business daily.

Talk to us today through email at sales@stratexalign.com, phone (0713 601 118), website, our LinkedIn page, or even through LinkedIn@stratexalign.com and let’s discuss how we can set you up for success.