The S.T.R.A.T.E.G.Y. Method: A Simple Approach To Strategic Business Planning
When you hear strategic business, what comes to mind?
For most of us it’s a stuffy boardroom crammed with people surrounding a long, wooden conference room, but my goal is to paint a different picture, one that is light, focused, and empowering.
Every business needs a business strategy. On the blog last week, I offered 9 reasons you need a business strategy, so I won’t rehash that here. Today, the focus is on how you create one!
Your business strategy is the clear articulation of your business vision, the impact you want to make, and the outline of actions and decisions you plan to take to reach your business goals and objectives. It defines what you need to do to reach your goals, helps guide the decision-making process for allocating your resources (time, money, people…), and shapes your marketing and sales efforts.
While all that may sound awesome, it can also be daunting. That’s why I created the S.T.R.A.T.E.G.Y. method last year. I wanted to give people a step by step process for getting a clear picture of what worked (and didn’t) the previous year, reassessing what you want your life and business to look like, setting your big goals for the year, ensuring you have a marketing plan and system that will help you gain traction and momentum, and building out monthly and weekly plans designed for massive action. All of this is done with an eye towards predictable, consistent revenue, so you can get off the revenue rollercoaster.
As we move closer to the end of the year, this becomes an especially important tool for setting yourself up for success when January rolls around.
Let’s dive into each step.
State of Affairs
This is your opportunity to take stock of everything that has transpired this year and begin to reflect and process what we can and have learned from it. This is also where you get to take a critical look at your numbers. They don’t lie, and in order to understand what you need to do differently, this step matters.
Thrive in Your Life
This is one of my favorite parts of the process, because you get to decide what’s working and what’s not in your life. Most of us have our noses to the grindstone, and at the end of the day, our business has to work with our life. I encourage you to dig into this and assess how things are going in four different areas - Health, Love, Friends & Family, and Work.
Revisit Your Business Design
Once you know what you need for your life, you can marry up your business goals and objectives with it. You can also evaluate whether the way you are serving clients is actually working. This is the stage where you reflect and document where your clients came from this year, what your biggest money maker was, and start building a plan to close any gaps you see.
Aim High
Goals are incredibly powerful. Often we get mired down in the process of goal setting, wanting them to be worded perfectly, questioning whether they’re SMART enough, or audacious enough… I encourage you not to get too bogged down here. The questions to ask yourself here are:
How much money do I want to pay myself this year?
How much revenue do I need to generate to make that happen?
What projects or activities will help me do it?
Tailor Your Marketing and Offers For Traction
Those big goals require you to have offers and to market and sell them, and that requires a system. That’s why I love building your Roadmap to Revenue and using the 5Cs because it gives you a simple process for plotting out what your offers will be this year and the way you need to market them for max effect.
Engineer Your Weekly Plans
This is where the rubber meets the road. I’m a huge believer in 90 day plans. When I look at an entire year and try to figure out all the steps I need to take to accomplish those goals, I feel myself shrinking under the weight of it, but 90 day plans help take the overwhelm out of the equation. This part of the process allows me to pick a focus, using my Roadmap to Revenue, every week and align my actions accordingly. This means I’m no longer spinning my wheels or wondering what exactly I’m supposed to be doing. I know because I’ve engineered it all.
Get Moving
It probably seems obvious, but everything leading up to this point is just a plan. Action is required for results, so this is where you GET GOING and do the work.
Your Weekly CEO Time
You’ve heard me talk about this a lot, but I can’t overstate just how important weekly CEO Time is to your success. This dedicated chunk of time on your calendar is YOUR time as the CEO to assess whether you’re on plan and make adjustments accordingly. It’s also where you get your head out of the weeds and take a bird’s eye view. It’s an incredibly powerful tool to keep you aligned, focused, and ready to pivot as needed.
So, that’s it. That’s the S.T.R.A.T.E.G.Y. Method, my simplified approach to strategic business planning. No matter how big or small your business is, this is an important element of your business success.
If you’re thinking this seems overwhelming, don’t worry. My friend and colleague, Becky Clabaugh and I created the free Design Your Best Year Yet Challenge, where you can dive into the S.T.R.A.T.E.G.Y. Method with us, so can walk away with a solid plan for growing your business in 2023! To join us, simply click here to reserve your spot.
