Business Strategy Development In Five Stages

What’s more likely to deliver results, charging blindly into a new situation and hoping for the best, or gathering as much information as you can and creating a detailed plan that guides your path?

Option one is undoubtedly more exciting, but also far more likely to fail miserably. For businesses looking to forge a brave new future for themselves, leaving the path up to chance is a terrible idea.

Instead, it would be best if you had a business strategy — an action plan that describes where you want to be and details exactly how to get there. Here are five steps you can take to design your own.

Lovely Strategy Picture by Wix Media

Examine the Current State of Your Business

It’s challenging to plan, and it would be best if you had a path forward, if you don’t know where you are. Before you do anything else, you should thoroughly assess the current state of your business.

Examine what’s working and what isn’t, the challenges you’re facing, who your customers are, where you sit in the competitive environment, and what opportunities and threats are out there for you.

Develop a Vision Statement and Future Direction

Once you know where you are, you need to develop a rigorous statement of where you want to be, and why you want to get there. A vision statement helps you plot the future direction of your organisation by authoritatively stating your future goals, and what you want to achieve in the medium to long-term. Significantly, it isn’t the time where you should concern yourself with how you’ll realise your vision. It’s more important that you inspire stakeholders and explain, in an ideal world, where you see your organisation going.

Develop a Mission Statement

Your mission statement should fit cohesively in alignment with your vision statement. The former is more practical than the latter, as it focuses on the present and describes a current picture of the company, challenges it’s looking to help, and why it exists.

You can view a mission statement as the “how” behind your vision statement. It elucidates what the company is doing in the present, and why those actions are essential to the future of the company.

Identify Strategic Objectives

You can think of strategic objectives as intermediate steps on the way toward a full realisation of your vision statement. You want to set realistic, achievable goals for each department in your organisation that drive everyone in the proper direction. These need to be measurable so that you have an accurate gauge of each department’s progress over time.

Draft Tactical Plans and Performance Management

With your overarching goal, and specific, high-level intermediate objectives in place, you’re ready to flesh out your business strategy with tactical plans designed to deliver all the ideas you’ve foreseen for yourself.

It would help if you also had management processes in place to monitor your company’s performance as it executes these plans to make sure you're meeting the deadlines necessary to hit your objectives. These should be firm but flexible so that they can adapt if conditions require.

Help Is Available at Noirwolf

These five steps simplify the process and should help you wrap your head around what’s needed when designing a business strategy, but there’s certainly a lot more to it. Creating an effective strategy requires much soul-searching, and can often benefit from outside, impartial help.

At Noirwolf, that’s what we do! We can help you design realistic objectives and a comprehensive plan that will deliver your vision.

To learn more about how Noirwolf consulting team can be vital in shaping your strategy, contact us today.