Whenever I talk to owner managers about strategic planning you can see their eyes glaze over. It all sounds like the sort of management speak they don't have time for at the sharp end. They will say "It's all very well for big companies with big budgets, but what will it do for me other than cost me a lot of money and time?" or "I have a budget/business plan". Having said that I am regularly astounded at how many don't have either.
Be that as it may, why should a business in the SME sector do strategic planning, and how do you do it faced with the level of uncertainty around in the current business climate?
Well lets take the last question first. Let me say first of all that all of life is uncertain all of the time. You can't get rid of uncertainty, so you have to learn to live with it. As they say the only certainties are death and taxes. However in business, as in every other aspect of life, you can reduce uncertainty by identifying those things which are likely to affect you the most and then thinking through what you would do should these things occur. By doing this, hey presto, you have some strategies to deal with the potential issues that may arise and thereby have reduced the uncertainty. Now you can't remove 100% of the uncertainty, and some events are so infrequent that you wouldn't think them worth considering, but if you can remove 50% of the uncertainty surely that is worth the effort.
The key issue for me is first of all is to do this analysis, the difference at the moment is that you should perhaps do it more often to make sure that your strategies reflect the fast changing environment.
So why should businesses small or large do some strategic planning? Fundamentally businesses that spend time considering the basics of, where are we now, where do we want to go, and how do we get there, are much more successful on average than those that just bumble along reacting to whatever is thrown at them. If you were going to cross the Atlantic you wouldn't set out without a map and supplies because, get it wrong and your dead. So it is with business, get it wrong and the business dies.
It seems to me fundamental that if you don't know what you are trying to achieve with your business how do you know what actions you should be taking (if you don't know where you are going any road will take you there). You don't have to be aiming to be the next Microsoft to do this sort of planning, it is just as effective if you just want to make a decent living and not have a lot of stress. Both are equally valid aspirations but they will, of course, require totally different strategies.
Strategic planning done well will help you see the wood for the trees and produce a solid plan as a foundation for the future of your business. Once you have this in place you can build around it a set of action plans, which are consistent with the plan and take the business towards its long and short-term goals, and which identify the resources required and their timing etc. All this then gives you a route map for the business against which progress can be monitored, and when the inevitable problem hits you will be able to see it early, consider its impact and take the appropriate actions to get back on course. Essentially a business which routinely carries out strategic planning as part of its business practices will be more in control of its destiny, and for the owner manager that means greater success with less stress.
For some of the benefits experienced by my clients, see their testimonials at http://ucs-success.com/testimonials.aspx. N.B. the Fletcher and Co testimonial was based on approx 8 days of work with the business so judge for yourself its effectiveness.
