Do you want to transform your business results? Having a strategy is the quickest way to transform your current business results. You need a strategy to start building and growing your businesses. You want to be strategic and not only small businesses that want to survive for the next month.
From my experience, my thinking is that most entrepreneurs aren’t strategic, but they are more and more tactical-oriented individuals. Their biggest worry is to generate enough 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 are not important, but only survival.
What is a Strategy?
A strategy is a plan of actions required to achieve a specific set of goals that your business wants to achieve.
To implement a strategy it is necessary to have more tactics. For example, if your strategy is to build long-term business relationships with your customers, tactics that you can use can be providing additional services to regular customers, training, long-term contracts with lower prices, etc. Each tactic contains specific activities that you must accomplish at a particular time and responsible persons for the completion of those actions.
Definition of Your Business Strategy
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a strategy as:
- a careful plan or method
- a clever stratagem
- the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal.
We can quickly note that the strategy is:
- the means to meet business objectives.
- a specific type of plan in which there are specified actions that you as an entrepreneur will need to take.
- made of tactics that on the other side have activities with which you will meet the desired objectives.
The Look of Your Business Strategy
I have seen various “so-called” strategies. They seem more like a textbook with 20-30 pages and refer to the period of 3-5 years without any specifics that must they must accomplish. As you can note from above if you want to implement strategies effectively, it is necessary to determine specific tactics and define all activities for each tactic.
My recommendation is before you continue with the reading, as a first look at the definitions in these subtitles. Then look at your business actions and see whether you have tactics that you accomplish from time to time, or you are using a long-term strategy.
How to change the strategy?
Strategy changes are not desirable to implement on an everyday basis. It is better to spend more time preparing it and committing to its completion. I have a terrible experience with frequently changing one strategy with another one before the finish of the first one. In such a case, employees and consultants that have worked for that organization 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.
6-steps approach strategic planning
I will try to define an approach with six steps that can help you to succeed in conducting strategic planning in your company. These steps will help you to change the current strategies if you need them.
- The first thing is to be sure that you have strategies that your business will implement, regardless of what you or other people think. You don’t 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 strategy and make it more proactive, rather than reactive. Don’t think about what somebody else makes. Think about what you want and you can achieve.
- Think about what you need to do to get the best results in the quickest time on a longer-term basis.
- Once you understand what will give you the best results in the quickest time on a long-term basis, you can start thinking about possible tactics.
- For each tactic prepare specific activities with deadlines and responsible persons that will need to implement these activities.
- And of course, at the end is system thinking. Establish feedback for measurement and monitoring of the implementation.
Micro Businesses and Their Strategies
If you own a micro company with few employees or without employees, it doesn’t mean that you will not need strategic thinking. This is a big mistake.
Small businesses also have their own goals, if nothing else in the first year the goal is survival. How then will they 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 overall business strategy, and all of these tactics you will follow by specific activities.
The difference is that the person that prepares the strategy at the same time will also be the executor of the strategy.
