Strategy – The Heart of Planning

What is Strategy?

Business Strategy is about:

1. Long Term Thinking
   • While strategy needs to be adaptable, it must focus on sustained competitive rather than short term wins. This means considering future trends, threats and market opportunities
2. Creating Unique Value
   • A superior strategy defines how a business will deliver value differently from competitors. This could be through lower costs, superior products, better service or by focusing on an underserved market.
3. Making Clear Trade-Offs
   • A business cannot be everything to everyone, so they must decide where to focus their resources and efforts. It’s about choosing what not to do as much as what to do.
4. Aligning Activities
   • All parts of the organisation need to work together coherently. Your pricing, product development, marketing, operations and other functions should reinforce each other and support your strategic position.

My Key Strategy Areas

If you’ve been following my content for a while it will come as no surprise that the I like to organise my strategy in the the following way:

1. Marketing
2. Operations
3. Innovation
4. People
5. Finance

Marketing Strategy

1. Target Customer/Positioning
   • This involves being totally clear on our ideal customer. What are their demographic and psychographic profiles, what are their needs and pain points, and what are their buying behaviours and preferences?
2. Products and Services
   • What is our solution to the problem or want that our ideal customer wants to solve?
3. Pricing
   • What is the value we are bring to our customer?
4. Distribution
   • How will our customers access our solution?
5. Promotion
   • How will we disseminate information about our offering?

Operations Strategy

1. Business Processes
   • Systemise the business by documenting processes to create time, reduce errors and scale your profits.
2. Waste Reduction
   • Using the Toyota Seven Wastes, we help you identify and eliminate waste in the business.
3. Continuous Improvement
   • By continually reviewing and refining systems within the business, efficient and effective operations will result.
4. Technology
   • Harness the power of the latest in technology and knowhow to propel the business to excellence.

Innovation Strategy

1. Culture
   • Developing a culture within the organisation that fosters innovation, fresh ideas and change.
2. Idea Generation
   • Have a regular forum for developing idea generation .
3. Stimulate Creative Thinking
   • Have an environment where people have the time and space to let free thinking occur.
4. Process for Implementation
   • Develop a formal structure of project teams to work on new business systems and have a reporting process in place.

People Strategy

1. Organisational Chart
   • Prepare an organisational chart even if some roles are not filled at the present time. Build a picture of the business we are building and have clarity in the chain of command.
2. Leadership
   • A strong leadership strategy should focus on vision, people, and execution. This is achieved by defining a clear and compelling future direction, build high-performing teams, and by establishing clear decision-making processes.
3. Culture
   • The culture of the organisation is to build a high-performance environment based on trust, innovation, and accountability. This will be achieved through clear values, empowered teams, open communication, and leaders who model these behaviors daily.
4. Team Engagement, Training, Development
   • Creating the above mentioned high performance environment through a team engagement, training and development focus.
5. Human Resource Management
   • The key elements of HR Management will cover off on workplace planning, recruitment and selection, compensation and benefits, performance management, employee relations and retention.

Finance Strategy

1. Financial Reporting
   • Determine frequency and composition of financial data to be presented. At a bare minimum this will require monthly Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet.
2. Budgetary Procedure
   • Document the process and responsibility for compilation of the annual budget.
3. Key Performance Indicators
   • Determine what financial and non financial data needs to be reported upon to help decision makers make informed decisions.
4. Working Capital Management
   • It’s a well used statement that Cash is King, and this element is super important to make sure that funds are managed correctly and put to the best use.
5. Working Capital and Funding
   • The business needs to have a well documented plan for funding over the long term for not only operating costs but for capital expenditure.

Conclusion

The above summary is basically my Business Accelerator Program. This is the framework used to work on business improvement in my client projects. The next step in the process is implementation. Once the strategy is written based on the above elements, a detailed action plan is developed and the magic happens!