Tag Archives: small business goals

Strategic Planning, Small Business Planner-Style!

We’re six weeks into 2020 and everyone is doing strategic planning for their small business! Which is a great thing…because, as we all known, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail…but as we were preparing to do this year’s strategic planning for Small Business Solver, we noticed that there were no good resources or tools out there to help small business owners through this process.

White 3D figure with a black necktie examines the word "Plan" in large,  red, 3D block letters with a magnifying glass. Keyword: strategic planning
Time for Strategic Planning!

So we created a strategic planning process of our own! We used it to do our own planning, and have since used it with 50 small businesses, non-profits, and large associations! We’ve been so excited by the results that we’ve made it a training module on the Small Business Solver Website! It was also the subject of a recent webinar:

In this webinar, you’ll learn about:

  1. The importance of defining your vision
  2. What makes an effective mission statement
  3. How to do a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Weaknesses) Analysis
  4. SMART goals
  5. Strategic Activities and getting them done with a Workplan

Defining Your Vision

Your vision tells you and the people involved with your business where your business is headed – it is your Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal! For strategic planning purposes, this goal is set for 5 years, although you’ll define goals for the 1, 3, and 5 year marks. Keep your mind open, because you’ll be setting Impossible Goals as well as Possible Goals! (As the webinar explains…)

An Effective Mission Statement

You’ll want to write a strong mission statement as part of your strategic planning. The webinar gives you a formula for writing a mission statement that is:

  1. Memorable
  2. Personal and inclusive
  3. A description of your daily activities
  4. Focused on your target market
  5. A description of the ideal result of your actions for your target market.

Your mission statement should motivate you and your staff!

Strategic Planning and SWOT!

A SWOT analysis forces you to take both internal and external inventory of factors that will affect the success of your business:

  1. Strengths – What do you have going for you?
  2. Weaknesses – What perceived gaps are holding you back?
  3. Opportunities – What are the possibilities or opportunities you can leverage
  4. Threats – What do you need to watch out for?

Your strategic planning will be much more effective when you have a clear idea of what you have to work with!

Strategic Planning Includes Strategic Goals

At this stage of strategic planning, you must define 3 – 5 critical areas for your business that are related to your Unique Selling Proposition. You’ll learn in the webinar that most small businesses list Revenue and Communications or Marketing as critical areas, and you’ll also see examples of other areas. Once you’ve defined your ctitical areas, you’ll write a strategic goal for each of them.

Your strategic plan really starts to take form once you’ve set these goals.

Strategic Activities and Workplan

You now need to list the activities required to make your strategic goals a reality create a workplan so that the work gets done! Ask yourself:

  1. What tasks need to be done so that the goals you’ve set are achieved?
  2. In what order should these tasks be done?
  3. Who is responsible for each task?
  4. What is the deadline for each task?

Keep your workplan and the strategic tasks in view so that they stay on the radar of everyone involved! See the webinar for some suggestions on how to do this.

Strategic Planning – Bottom Line!

Strategic planning lets you take a large amount of data about your business and the areas within it and reduce the overwhelm around what to do next. You’ll end the process with a manageable number of goal, a plan for getting them done, and (hopefully!) a commitment to repeat the process the next year!

Check out the webinar…and then check out our new Strategic Planning Training Module and get your strategic planning done for 2020! And be sure to let us know what you think (here, or on Facebook, or on Twitter, or by email at sarah@smallbusinesssolver.com)…because we love to hear from you!

Business Clarity Questions for Small Business

The New Year is a great time to plan to ramp up your business.

Getting ready for 2015 involves getting your business ready with a solid foundation to move forward. Your foundation is based on answering these 7 critical questions.

In 20 minutes, walk through the business clarity questions and answer them for your business. Make your 2015 more impactful!

Contact the Expert

Charles McFarland
Email: cmcfarland@focalpointcoaching.com
Website: https://www.charlesmcfarland.ca
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachingbusinessandartsleaders
Twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesmcf

SBS Clarity 14 Jan 2015

Guaranteed Better Than The Rest

Differentiating your small business and continuing to improve your business are two key pieces of being better than the rest.

But how do you get this in motion? Where do you start?

In 15 minutes we walk through two key objectives;
1. Ensuring that you are making time to work on your business rather than in it
2. Outlining 5 key ways to differentiate your business and how to do this

Contact the Expert

Eloise Pasianotto
www.effectiveprofessionalconsulting.com

How To Do A Quarterly Review?

How do we know if we are on track for our yearly goal? How can we ensure that our strategy is working?
 
Small business owners need to do a quarterly review!
 
Without a quarterly review we are falling into the trap of working in our business and not on it. All of our activities become tasks rather than things that will help our business grow.
 
This video walks through:
1. Why is a review so critical? What are the reasons why our quarterly review might be higher or lower than we expected? What are the reasons why we might have to tweak the rest of our annual plan?
2. Super quick overview of strategic planning
3. How to do a quarterly review. What to be analyzing and what to be considering for the future.
4. Best practices and the top things to avoid when executing a strategic plan.
 

 
Contact The Expert
 
The Small Business Solver Team
info@smallbusinesssolver.com
 
Additional Resources
 
Like the PowerPoint? how do to a quarterly review
Want a template to use for your quarterly review? Quarterly-Review-MODEL
 

Action Planning

Get Started. Keep Going! This is the life of the small business owner and entrepreneur in 2014 trying to get their business ramped up or growing.
 
The number one reason why a small business owner is successful in the short term is based on how much they are moving forward.  Every time that you say the words ‘I will’, are you?  Not that you necessarily have to be on time, but you need to do it if you said you would.  Being action oriented and getting things done is critical to success.
 
The Action Planning Process includes the following steps;
1. Goal Setting
2. Action Planning
3. Implementation
4. Measure the Results
5. Assess/Reassess
 

 
Contact Information
 
Gary Brown
gary.brown@fsainc.ca
 
Like the Slides? SBS-action planning webinar

Benchmarking & Performance Management for Small Business

 

What gets measured will get done.

 
Large businesses and small business alike use performance metrics with the intent to motivate their employees. However often these metrics are misguided and resulting in undesirable behaviour. They are not tied to the strategic performance of the organization.
 
In this video learn…
 
1. Why have metrics?
2. How to create your metrics that will actually help your business
3. Understand what a balanced scorecard is and what components make up a small business’ balanced scorecard
4. Learn how to monitor and implement the metrics in the most effective and efficient way possible
 
There are a lot of red flags when it comes to metrics, and if done improperly a metric can actually stunt your business’ growth rather than foster it.
 
Always remember that what gets measured will get done!
 

 

Performance management resources

 
Examples of Critical Success Factors and Metrics
 
Want the slides for this presentation? Performance Management