Is the idea of a business strategy overblown? After all, there are loads of businesses out there chugging merrily along without one. Loads more have some vague ideas they like to call a strategy, but are really more like a wishlist.
So yeh, maybe flying by the seat of your pants can work – for a while.
You may be able to run a business without a strategy, but you can’t grow it. Sooner or later, you will hit a wall you can’t break through, and you’ll be stuck there spinning your wheels while the rest of your industry zooms on by.
You also won’t know how to build resilience or change course if you need to, making your business vulnerable to disruptions – like economic downturns, changing markets, alien invasions and whatever other scary thing pops up on your newsfeed.
OK, so a strategy might not feel necessary in your day-to-day. But it’s actually a pretty big deal if you want your business to have long-term security.
How to Write Your First Business Strategy
When you’re writing a business strategy for a small or medium company, it’s important to remember two things:
1. Commit, and
2. Keep it simple.
There are a zillion strategy frameworks, and you can make yourself barmy trying to explore them all. Just pick a methodology and run with it. Don’t change it up every year and don’t overcomplicate it.
Once you’ve picked a framework, schedule a strategy day. People think more creatively when you shake them out of their routine, so book someplace offsite and include fun elements to get the creativity flowing.
Who to Include
Your strategy session needs a facilitator to ask questions, guide conversation and keep things on track. In a perfect scenario, you’ll have a fresh strategy session every quarter and the same person will run it every time.
A business coach is a great option to lead your session. They know what a good strategy looks like, they bring loads of experience from taking other teams through the process and they’re not bogged down in the business’s internal politics.
If you go with an in-house strategy chair, don’t limit yourself to the CEO or the GM. Look for someone who understands the company inside and out, who has the charisma to hold everyone’s attention for a day and who connects well with the whole team.
Keep the guest list at this shindig limited to key leadership. It’s great for your strategy to reflect input from the whole company, but strategy sessions can get a little intense.
You need an atmosphere where the team can talk openly, make tough decisions, even argue. When everyone from Pam from payroll to Bobby the IT guy is in the room, it’s hard to have frank, open discussions about the elephants in the room.
And while healthy debates and disagreements are important in building a sound strategy, witnessing them can be morale killers for the team. Let your leadership team get the ducks in a row, then unveil the strategy to the rest of the staff for comment.
Business Strategy Basics
You’ve got to know where you are before you can plan where you’re going. So start by reviewing what happened the last year (or quarter, depending on how long it’s been since the last meeting).
Did you hit key performance indicators?
Did you complete your goals?
How does everyone rate your performance as a team?
What key issues are outstanding as you head into the next period?
OK, now you can start planning, right? Hold on, eager beaver. Not just yet.
Before you get tactical, you need to thrash out your company’s core values, your vision for the future and your mission in the market.
Unless these things are documented, everyone on the team is operating from their own assumptions.
And since you (probably) don’t have a team of thought-sharing mind readers, those assumptions can be wildly different.
This isn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff that goes on a motivational poster. It’s the foundation you return to again and again to make hard business decisions.
When your business is faced with an opportunity (like a new market) or a threat (like a mud-slinging competitor), you can step back and ask,
What response aligns with the company’s values?
What response advances the vision and mission?
This section belongs in your strategy because it’s the unchanging North Star of your company identity.
Setting Long, Medium and Short Term Goals
Once everyone agrees on who the company is and what it’s doing in the world, take a break to have a snack or do a fun activity.
Now that everyone’s refreshed, it’s time to start setting business goals. You’re going to write four sets of goals:
Long-term goals for the next 10 years
Medium-term goals for the next 5 years
Short-term goals for the next 1 year
Immediate goals for the next 90 days
At our company’s strategy sessions, we start with a SWOT analysis (that’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). We also review the goals and issues brought up earlier in our recap of the last period.
Next, everyone goes off on their own for five or 10 minutes to brainstorm. Then we come back together and put all the goals on a whiteboard in one massive list.
Next, we roll up our sleeves and get to work. We talk through the list and decide which goals to keep, which to kill and which to combine.
We whittle it down to the most critical five to 10 that move us forward in the direction we set.
Why 90-Day Goals are Key
Quarterly goals might feel like overkill, but they’re actually the only way to keep moving forward.
It’s hard to stay motivated for 12 months, when daily progress is so incremental you don’t even notice it. That’s why most New Year’s resolutions don’t make it to April.
Ninety-day goals feel more achievable, especially when you have a strategic accountability partner to keep everyone’s eyes on the prize.
An accountability partner keeps people motivated with regular follow-ups and check-ins. They identify and remove roadblocks and drive progress people can see and celebrate.
As everyone works day to day on their 90-day goals, before you know it, the one-year goals are in reach. And that makes the three-year and five-year goals look less ambitious and more realistic.
Speaking of being realistic – goal setting is a time to dream big, but not too big. You can’t execute 15 goals in 90 days, no matter how awesome you are.
Pick three to five projects for your leadership team to focus on this quarter. Make sure every one is a SMART goal (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) and set every one on a realistic timeline.
Finish the day with a problem-solving session. List out all the big, hairy problems that are still unresolved and work on finding solutions as a team.
Some will end up being folded into projects. Some will drop to a list of things to keep an eye on in the future. And most important, the team will come out with a list of to-dos to get the most urgent problems solved and gone.
Implement Your Business Strategy
A strategy you don’t implement is just a book no one wants to read. Once you have it, share it with your team and get working on it!
Post it somewhere everyone can see it: in your project management tool, in meeting agendas, even on the office wall.
To keep your strategy top-of-mind, review it regularly – and we don’t mean once a year. We’re talking about bringing it up weekly or fortnightly to check in on progress.
How to Turn Plans Into Action
Look, everyone comes out of meetings like this chuffed to get started and build a Brave New World.
Then you go back to your regular workday, and there are emails to answer and projects to finish and fires to put out. And the to-do list from the strategy session feels like a lot of extra work that you will get to, just not right now.
Before you know it, the quarter’s flown by, it’s time to schedule the next strategy check-in – and everyone realizes their to-do lists have just one or two lonely checkmarks (some are still pristine).
This is nothing to get discouraged about. And it definitely doesn’t mean you should stop strategizing. It just means you should enlist a little help to keep you on track – and we’ve got the perfect folks to do it for you.
We designed our ZAP (the Zembr Accountability Program) to help small and medium businesses get over the hurdle of putting plans into action.
In ZAP, an executive assistant trained in strategy helps leadership teams nail down an actionable 90-day plan.
Here’s the kicker: your strategic EA then helps you put the plan into action. They follow up and check in regularly with everyone on the team. They keep you accountable to your goals, and help identify and remove obstacles as they come up.
So when the next quarterly meeting comes around, everyone is still chuffed – but this time it’s about all the progress they’ve made.
This exciting new program is still in beta, set to officially launch in early 2024. Click here to be notified of its launch, and become one of the first businesses ZAPping your strategy into results.
