Does your organization struggle with being able to lay a plan out for the year or do you find yourself constantly battling to inspire your team to achieve the goals you have set for the year?
A recent survey by Small Business Pulse shows that 64% of leaders say that their increased revenue is directly linked to their complete strategic planning process.
Have you heard the Winston Churchill quote? — “He who fails to plan is planning to fail.”
Before I began to follow a strategic planning process, my business was progressing, but I knew there was more to achieve. However, I couldn’t figure out how to do this. What I had been missing for so long was connecting core values, vision statement, mission statement, strategic goals, and my team into one linked, purposeful machine.
In our two-day strategy meeting, we were determined to come away with a plan that would lead us to success in the coming year. We had finished affirming our current values and vision as a group. Each year we would choose a new mission statement combined with different goals for the company, and in a later meeting, we would begin to divide the goals into KPIs for each of our store locations. We involved the staff at the store level by having them make fun, engaging scoreboards for tracking purposes.
I want to share a process with you that will bring your yearly plan, strategic goals, and employee buy-in all into one easy-to-use framework that will help you lose your frustrations and headaches quickly.
Buy-In
One of the crucial aspects of making your plan work within your organization is achieving buy-in with your leaders. The more involved they are in formulating parts of the plan, the more successful they will be with getting their team on board.
Core Values
If you already have them in place, make sure they are still relevant. Core values, the guiding principles that dictate behavior and action, can help companies determine if they are on the right path and fulfilling their business goals because core values create an unwavering and unchanging guide.
Vision Statement
The vision statement states what the leadership ultimately envisions the business to be in terms of growth, values, employees, and contributions to society.
Mission
The mission statement is a concise statement of your business strategy and developed so that it puts things into action which will directly make your vision operational.
The mission statement should answer three questions:
•What do we do?
•How do we do it?
•For whom do we do it?
Forward Thinking
This mental process allows you to move forward to a point where you have successfully achieved or exceeded your goal, envisioning what success looks and feels like, and what the organization is experiencing. Once you have a firm grip on that vision, you can then start working backward step-by-step to where you are setting the steps to reach the goal. Taking the time to go forward and working your way backward have been key success factors for many people in both personal and professional life.
“The Compass Analyzer” ™
It helps find true direction. This phase looks deeply into the revenue and profit stream. While the purpose should not be exclusively dedicated to money, the revenue stream can be a good tracking mechanism for the purpose of realizing the product and service offerings of the business.
Your Strategic Vision
In order to make sure you stay headed in the correct direction, we designed a product called “Your Strategic Vision” ™. The reasoning is to take quality vision and mission statements and develop those into workable, realistic goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Goals And KPI’s
This brought us to the point where we needed to craft our goals and create the KPIs that would help us reach these.
Well-crafted KPIs should be:
•Specific and clear
•Explicitly linked to the purpose
•Plan language
•Bite-sized chunks
•Measurable
•Deadline-driven
Scoreboards
How did we achieve the important task of getting our local teams excited and behind the KPIs, we had established in the meeting? We asked each team to design its own personalized store scoreboard for tracking the progress of the KPIs. Keep your scoreboard simple. You can have a computer-based software scoreboard, or you can make very basic ones to hang in the breakroom.
Here is the process for successful scoreboard creation:
• Identify #1 KPI and predictable activities.
• Choose scoreboard type.
• Construct scoreboard.
• Make sure the scoreboard is visible.
• Share, post, and measure it.
After we started implementing our strategic vision with our team. Here were the benefits we received:
1. Increase our engagement with our team members (employees)
2. Increased our bottom line profits because everyone was in sync with our goals and key performance indicators that drove our business.
3. Our scoreboards helped share with our team if we were winning or losing.
You know when you have a competition, you want to know if you are winning or losing and nothing drives performance better than knowing the score.
Finally, you can get the ultimate frustration and headache relief for yourself and your organization. Once you have a strategic plan in place, all of the questions about what to do, how to do it, and how everybody fits into the success of the organization for the coming year falls into place and you have a point of reference for the entire year!! Take the weight off of your shoulders and empower your people to achieve the success they were hired to achieve!
To help you with this process, we are providing you with The Blueprint For Growth Ebook. This will walk you through the planning process step by step. It’s free to download. Click this link to access it now: https://offer.goascend.biz/sop-the-blueprint-to-growth-ebook-downloads-opt-in
If you are struggling in your business, reach out to me. I understand the daily challenges you face when running your business. I have over 30 years of experience running 12 successful businesses. That is why I started the Ascend Mastermind because it is my mission to help business owners succeed in business and life.
Make it a GREAT Day!
Gary Wilbers