Grow your business with strategic planning
Thoughts on strategic planning, and some tips on how to start putting together a clear strategy for your company based on my own experience.
When a company starts to grow, the decision-making process becomes more complex.
The daily decisions to keep the business running efficiently demand a decentralization, and cannot depend on one or two individuals (normally the founders) anymore.
If you add resource limitations and a constantly-changing environment to the equation, you will get to the "AHA" moment when you figure that you need strategic planning.
7 years ago, we had that "AHA" moment at Intraway. We needed to grow fast. We needed a structured method to do it. We needed a framework
So we held an all-day meeting with the founding team in a relaxing environment at the beautiful Japanese Garden in Buenos Aires.
We started building our aspirational blueprint, having very passionate (and long) discussions around 3 decisions that every company must get right:
I remember that we used the "Mission to Mars" exercise to guide our discussions. We asked ourselves:
If we would have to replicate Intraway on Mars...
And so on...
It was a transformational experience, both for Intraway as a company and for me at a personal level. We discovered the art of strategic planning
We came up with a set of poorly documented but insightful statements that built our first shared vision and strategic plan
A couple of months later, we decided to move a step forward and implement the Scaling Up framework with the help of incredible coaches.
The main 3 things that I've learned during the process:
I am an engineer so I love practical things. The one-page strategic plan (OPSP) is a great tool to bring together all the components of your strategy to make it easier to understand and communicate
Define your vision
- Core Values - What are our beliefs? They are a set of rules that define the company's culture and personality
- Purpose - Why are we doing what we’re doing? Why should I have passion for what we’re doing? It has to be meaningful
- BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) - What do we want to achieve in 10-25 yrs? It has to be an audacious challenge that leads everyone in the same direction
- Brand Promises - What value can we consistently deliver to our customers? It helps build your brand awareness
Define your priorities
- Targets - Where is our company headed in 3-6 yrs?
- Goals - What do we want to achieve in 12 mo?
- Actions - What do we plan for this quarter?
Define your objectives
- Indicators - Which are our critical numbers? Who is accountable for each?
I learned that your gut and intuition do not always help you make the right decisions. Sometimes they are counterintuitive.
Strategic planning keeps the team aligned to achieve superior results.
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