Solid strategy
Designing and delivering innovative strategic plans to drive you forward
Strategic Planning
You hear that word a lot in the corporate world, but are you doing it right? If your firm has a vision statement, has set goals for how to achieve it, and has a plan for how to get from A to B, you might think that you’ve got your strategic plan sorted.
However, according to Harvard Business Review, ‘if you’re entirely comfortable with your strategy, there’s a strong chance it isn’t very good’.
At PANDEK Group we design and deliver challenging and engaging strategic workshops so that your organisation can concentrate on contributing and collaborating, rather than coordinating.
Benefits of Strategic Planning
- Empowers employees when they know how to be efficient
- Helps to increase market share and profitability
- Increases operational efficiency
How do strategically plan properly
Strategic analysis
Something you may not have done is a proper strategic analysis before you set your goals in the first place. There are three common frameworks to do this: SWOT, Porter’s 5 Forces, and PESTLE.
SWOT analysis
This is about finding the internal and external factors that are favourable (or not) in achieving the target.
•Strengths of the business
•Weaknesses of the business
•Opportunities that may be fruitful
•Threats that may be obstructive
The PESTLE framework
This analyses the business environment in terms of:
•Political (noting any changes in taxation or trading)
•Economic (noting fluctuations in interest rates, inflation, and consumer demand)
•Social (noting demographic trends or new lifestyle patterns)
•Technological (noting developing and competing technologies and any necessity for updated equipment)
•Legal (noting changes to employment laws or regulations within relevant sectors)
•Environmental (noting changes in customer, regulator, or employee expectations on sustainability)
The Five Forces framework
This analyses the competitive environment and the extremity of the following ‘forces’:
•Customer bargaining power
•Supplier bargaining power
•Threat of new entrants entering the market
• Threat and costs of switching to other brands
• Level of competition between businesses in the market
Formulate the plan
After your strategic analysis, make sure you incorporate:
- Analysis of both internal and external drivers
- Your vision statement
- The major goals/objectives
- The key actions that will get you from A to B
- The impact that these actions will have on the business’ resources (ie. Staff required or equipment)
Implementing the strategy
This is the art of completion.
- Define the variables that might hinder your journey to reaching your goal
- Develop a solid structure
- Delegate the work
- Maximise the relevant resources
- Redirect marketing efforts in line with the strategy goals.
Evaluation
It is important to evaluate the performance of your strategy to learn from it and grow.
Measure performance, continuously review the internal/external factors assessed in the strategic analysis phase, and correct any elements affected.
