How many small businesses have a strategy? Are entrepreneurs using it to build and growth their businesses? Are small businesses strategic, tactical or only small businesses that are considering how to survive the month?
From my experience and contacts with entrepreneurs, I think that the most of them are not strategically but tactical oriented people. This means that they are most worried about generating income to pay bills and to survive the month. This means that small businesses don’t have and use strategies. This means that growth and development is not important, but only survival.
What is the Strategy?
Strategy is a plan of actions for achieving the set of goals that our business has. To implement a strategy it is necessary to have more tactics. For example, if our strategy is to build long-term business relationships with our customers, tactics that we can use for implement it can be providing additional services to regular customers, training, long-term contracts with lower prices, etc. Each tactic has specific activities that must be completed in specific time, and responsible persons for the completion of those activities.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as:
- a careful plan or method
- a clever stratagem
- the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal.
It is noticeable that:
- It is the means to meet business objectives.
- It is a kind of plan in which are specified actions that you as an entrepreneur will take.
- It is composed by tactics that are consisted from activities with which we will meet the desired objectives.
I have seen various “so-called” strategies. They seem more as a textbook with 20-30 pages and refer to the period of 3-5 years without any specifics that must be accomplished. As you can note from above for accomplishment of strategies it is necessary to determine the tactics and to define all activities for each tactic.
My recommendation before proceeding with a change of strategies is first to look at the definitions in this subtitle. Then look at your business actions and see whether it is tactics that you accomplish from time to time, or it is a long-term strategy.
How to change the strategy?
Changing the strategy is not desirable to do on an everyday basis. It is better to spend more time to prepare it and commit to its completion. I have a bad experience with frequently changing one strategy with another one before the finish of a deadline for which is provided the first one. In such a situation, the employees and consultants that work for that organizational system don’t know which one is in force.
The strategy was prepared by top management of the business, and is implemented and executed by all company members.
I will try to define an approach with 6 steps that can help you succeed to conduct strategic planning in your business and to change the current strategies if you have it, or maybe you think that you have it.
- The first thing is to be sure you have strategies that your business follows, although you are not satisfied with it. You do not need a strategy that will sit in a drawer and holds dust. If this is the case then it is better not to waste your time on this.
- Once when you are sure that you have and follow the strategy it is necessary to adjust the same strategy to make it proactive, rather than reactive. Don’t think about what somebody else makes. Think about what you want to achieve and do.
- Think about what you need to do to receive the best results in the quickest time on a longer term basis.
- Once you understand what it is that will give you the best results in the quickest time on a longer term basis you can start thinking about possible tactics.
- For each tactic prepare specific activities with deadlines and persons responsible for carrying out these activities.
- And of course at the end is system thinking. Establish feedback for measurement and monitoring of implementation.
Micro Businesses and Strategies
If you own a micro business with few employees or without employees it doesn’t mean that you don’t need strategic thinking implemented in business. This is a big mistake. Are small businesses having their own goals? Certainly, I think yes, if nothing else in the first year the goal is survival. How then they will survive? Will they offer an advantage to the customers or will provide more quality service? Will they apply new marketing methods and techniques? All these ideas are survival tactics as a part of the business strategies. All of this tactics will be followed by activities.
The difference is that person that prepares the strategies will be the executor of it in the same time.
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