Business strategy (Part 2 of 2): Creating a plan to achieve your business goal

In the last blog we talked about what a strategy is and identified that the two main parts of your business strategy are:

1. What is the overall aim or long-term goals – this is the why you own your business?

2. What is the plan including actions do you need to take to get there?

In my last blog, I encouraged you to sit down and define your why. This was used to create your overall aim and identify what the business needs to achieve to deliver to the why you are a business owner.

Stage 2 is setting the action plan – what steps or actions need to be taken to get from where you are now to where you want to be. So a reminder you need you need to know your gap between where the business is now and where you want to be.

Let's get specific about what you need to achieve in key parts of your business – these could include targets on sales level, staffing numbers, margins,  product lines and overall profitability. Sit down with a blank piece of paper and split the page in half. On one side, write what you're achieving now and on the other the targets to meet your overall goal. This will clearly demonstrate the gap.

Closing the gap

To set the next part of the strategy, we consider what actions we need to take to close the gap. It's a good idea to consider milestones.  For example, maybe you want to double your sales. This requires a staged approach so you're aiming initially to simply achieve 25% growth in 6 months. Make it realistic so you can celebrate your progress but also make it a stretch so you have something to aim for towards your ultimate goal.

To give some idea, let's talk through an example:

Sales Target:  The target is to increase your sales from say $50,000 to $500,000 over a two year period.  You have identified you need to have three salespeople on the road and two new contracts plus increase production by 50%.

Milestone one is to reach $100,000 in six months. So the actions we decided to set this on its way:

1. Hire new salesperson this quarter

2. Organise to meet with three new potential clients

3. Set the sales targets and incentives for current salespeople

4. Update reporting schedule and set budgets incorporating these targets and additional cost structures

5. Create production schedule with production manager about timing of growth structure.

Apply this sort of approach to all your key goals in your strategy (write this up!)

1. Set the target of what you're trying to achieve

2. Break it down by milestones

3. Set the actions that you need do to achieve the target and schedule.

This is where a business advisor/coach/CFO can help you, but you can also get a lot of online help. Choose one or two actions and get moving forward – good enough is better than doing nothing.