Mid-Michigan
Creating a yearly strategic plan isn’t something small businesses like to spend time doing. One poll of business owners discovered only one third of them had in place a written down plan. Yet it’s been shown time and again that to optimize your business’s success, you need to develop a strategic plan each year.
Today, with all that’s been happening across business markets and the economy, it’s critical to have a plan for what your business will be doing next year. The pandemic uncovered strengths and weaknesses in many businesses. It also created new opportunities for networking, prospecting, and ways of working with clients, co-workers, and outside partners. Today’s high inflation and slowing economy create new challenges you need to get ahead of to ensure your continued success. The answer is to sit down and put together that 2023 business plan. Your AdviCoach business coach is a great resource for this, and here are the main steps you’ll cover.
Step 1. Evaluate the situation.
Things have changed a lot these past few years. So, the first thing to do is to take a deep look at where you’re at now. A good way to approach that is to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. Here is some background on SWOT. The best thing about doing a SWOT analysis is it will give you valuable insight into the goals you’ll be setting in the following step.
Step 2. Decide what you want to achieve.
Look at every category—audiences to target, geographical reach, gross revenue, and net profit. Then, consider how you should grow. Should you focus on gaining market share, on enlarging your audience or marketing area, on adding or enhancing products and services, or on something else? Make sure your goals are SMART—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. Here’s more on SMART goals.
Step 3. Get key people involved.
For businesses with employees, it’s wise to bring all the important players into the process of creating the company plan. This makes them invested in it, and they’ll often provide some very useful insights. If your business involves just a couple of people, be sure to bring your AdviCoach business coach into the planning process. This trusted advisor brings outside perspective and can be a great source of fresh ideas.
Step 4. Create the 2023 business plan.
The strategic plan itself is simply the action plan you’ll execute to reach the SMART goals you put down in Step 2. Think about everything you’ll need—employees, partners, funds, equipment, physical space—all the resources you’ll use to succeed next year. Then, specify the strategies and tactics you’ll employ in the areas that are most critical to your success—hiring, product and service development, funding, marketing, sales, or other activities.
Step 5. Create scorecards.
Take each goal in your strategic plan. Then, map out the milestones you want to hit each week, month, quarter, and at the end of the year. You can even break these milestones down by department if that makes sense.
Step 6. Write down a Plan B.
Be prepared for the unforeseen. Plan B approaches are the scenarios you’ll pursue for dealing with emerging issues. These could range from funding or hiring challenges, to supply chain delays, to fuel and other operating cost increases, to product or service issues, business slowdowns, and more. While you’re scoping out Plan B scenarios, decide on what small percentage of incoming revenue you should be setting aside as a cash reserve to cover these “rainy day” events.
The most important thing about your 2023 strategic plan process is to START IT NOW!