Many SME business owners work tirelessly in their businesses and are excellent at what they do, but they neglect their strategy and execution plans. It’s the old adage: ‘I’m too busy working in my business to work on it’.
While we’re always here to support our clients when unexpected hiccups occur, it’s much smarter for business owners to avoid hiccups by getting ahead of risks and opportunities.
What is business strategy and why is it important?
There’s a misconception that being busy is automatically being effective. Some work hours are highly productive, which is great, provided you’re being productive on the right things. But if you’re fighting avoidable fires, dealing with HR issues or performing avoidable rework, your time is not being used wisely.
Business strategy is a clear set of plans, actions and goals that describes how you will be successful in your market. It helps you to put out fires before they cause damage. It also helps you to capitalise on opportunities you can only see when you come up for air. In other words, sharpening the axe before cutting the tree will make for a much easier task. Cutting the right tree helps too.
Time spent refining your strategy and planning implementation will pay back massively when you execute your plans operationally in your business. Making time for regular planning helps keep your business calibrated, so it stays on track.
How to do business strategy
As business strategy specialists, we believe best practice for getting started with your strategy is to book a 60-minute complimentary meeting with us.
After this initial meeting, we can support you to create your annual business plan and undertake annual forecasting – two critical services to capture and support the achievement of effective and realistic goals.
Lastly, we recommend ongoing check-ins with us (at least quarterly) to report back and ensure accountability for achieving your 90-day goals and actions, as well as to recalibrate and set new goals. These recurring services are highly effective for our business clients.
This commitment is roughly a total of 20 hours per year (including travel, if any) or just 1% of your working time, assuming the average business owner works 2,000 hours a year in their business.
s
| Best Practice (strategy planning) | Time Investment (incl. travel) |
| Complimentary Meeting | 2 hours |
| Annual Business Plan | 6 hours |
| 4 x Quarterly Check-ins* | 8 hours |
| Annual Forecast | 4 hours |
| * Minimum frequency | 20 hours (1% of 2,000) |
Finding time for business strategy and planning
Planning supports efficiency. Efficiency might come in the form of less rework, less paperwork, less friction in your team, or simply more focus and higher productivity.
Putting the time in upfront for planning and strategy will give you hours back and improve your bottom line in the future. Part of the process is defining what you want from your business in general. More time with family? More time for golf? A broader product offering? To learn life-long lessons that pay off in all facets of your life? To pump business value up for your succession?
It’s not easy work. It’s challenging, but it’s also enlightening, passion-igniting and rewarding. We’re committed to supporting our clients to make their businesses more robust, scalable and valuable.
Get in touch if you’d like a 60-minute complimentary meeting about business strategy and planning.
