FLORIDA SMALL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CENTER AT IRSC
36
PROPER STRATEGIC PLANNING
CAN LEAD TO PROFITS
TCBusiness.com
Goals, goals, goals — we all have them,
but did your company hit them last year?
How about for the Q3 and Q4 of 2019?
What are your growth goals for 2020 for all
of your functional areas and does everyone
in your company know what they are?
If your company is like a lot of small
businesses, there’s room for improvement.
In a recent holiday period discussion,
one owner of a local restaurant chain
described his planning effort as “just winging
it.” Unfortunately, this is the situation
too often in today’s business management.
The competitive marketplace is too
complex and moving too fast to trust the
fate of your organization to be guided by
intuition and the laws of random chance.
That’s where strategic growth planning
comes in, says Spike Schultheis, a consultant
with Florida SBDC at Indian River
State College. Already have your goals, you
say? Often times, Schultheis says, a company
will develop goals, but do they track
progress and does the company meet or
exceed those goals? According to Schultheis
while most business owners think
strategically, their business does not have
a good strategic planning process in place
that every employee participates in.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, profitability
is not the result of luck or good
fortune in the marketplace. The profitability
of your organization can be planned.
A sustainable strategic growth planning
process focuses on the little steps your
company can make every single quarter.
These steps help your business grow and
stay on track for achieving your larger
goals. The process should involve every
single person in your company.
Schultheis believes that the strategic
business plan for the organization will review
the current market and the resources
available to create a strategic platform to
guide the business’s allocation of energies
and resources. The strategic plan created
will project the results expected and assigns
specific objectives and responsibilities
for their successful execution with
specific outcomes defined in both dollars
and calendar milestones. While every business
should have a traditional business
plan in place and update regularly, a strategic
plan takes a deeper dive into specific
actionable items, providing clarity and
direction for employees. A strategic plan
focuses on aligning three key areas of the
business: The Mission and vision; defining
the business’s purpose. Strategic Platform:
The rationale for approach to the market.
The specific Action Initiatives and Performance
Metrics to measure achievements.
“In short, the strategic plan is about
creating a competitive advantage for the
business in a rapidly changing business
environment,” said Schultheis says.
Getting started with the strategic plan:
1. To have repeated growth year after
year, a business needs to have an intentional
planning process in place.
2. The business needs to formulate overarching
objectives for the organization. It
needs to be one statement that everyone
in the company can see how their work
leads to that objective. Then everyone
feels they are contributing to that result.
3. The company needs to have a growth
goal with quantitative objectives and
milestones for every business function
within the company. Whether that is an
established department or just one person,
you still need that function — sales and
marketing, operations, HR, finance, CEO
strategy — to have a target for the year.
4. All these goals need to be broken
down into specific bite-sized pieces that
can be accomplished every quarter by
one human being. It’s not the company
will do X, it’s John Smith will be doing X;
it needs to be that specific. Each of these
steps will move the company forward to
the strategic objective that you have for
the company.
5. Every quarter, recognize and celebrate
your successes. This helps to keep
the focus on strategic growth.
“The goals should be stretch goals —
pushing the organization beyond the day
to day work to move the organization
toward overall long-term sustainable
growth,” Schultheis says.
For now, look for ways the business can
break down your big growth goals into actionable
steps each quarter that will make
growth headway for your company — and
get buy-in from the entire team. Make
sure to go beyond sales and operations —
also have goals for HR and finance. Once
accomplished, celebrate those, and make
another step in the next quarter.
For more information on how Schultheis
and the entire Florida SBDC at IRSC Team
can help your organization develop a strategic
plan, contact Katie Muldoon at kmuldoon@
irsc.edu or call 772-336-6285. v
BY NANCY DAHLBERG
With responsibilities involving a wide
range of business environments,
including technology, consulting
and venture development, Spike
Schultheis held sales and marketing
management positions for over 40
years. His experience includes work
within the areas of internet and
broadband network architecture
design, network deployment planning,
sales and marketing program
development, and consumer market
launches. Schultheis’ work focuses
on business to business segments,
energy and telecommunications
utilities and federal, state, and local
government sectors. He is proficient
in the emerging electronic commerce
technologies and has developed
forecasting applications and complex
business financial models to support
new technology venture financing and
development initiatives. He earned
a bachelor’s degree at Princeton
University in economics and sociology
and received his MBA in marketing
from the Wharton School of Business
at the University of Pennsylvania.
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