How to Develop Your Small Business Strategy 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. Look at missed opportunities and try to identify what was the missing link - was its owing to a lack of resources? A lack of skills? Not professionally articulated your position and business proposal?

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 organization 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 realize your vision. It’s more important that you inspire stakeholders and explain, in an ideal world, where you see your organization going.

Example vision statements can be found here: on the project manager Website blog

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.