In the '60s, at Stanford Research Institute by management consultant Albert Humphrey created the SWOT analysis. While there have been many derivatives of SWOT analysis over the years, it is best known as an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and "Threats."  

I recommend a modification of a SWOT that I call a SWaTOL;

Strengths, Weaknesses, and then focus on emerging Trends; in these trends, you look to find those emerging opportunities that align with your industry, your offerings, and your strengths. Once you identify an opportunity, or two leverage them by creating a brisk quarterly strategic project. 

But you have to move fast; these opportunities will pass quickly. Do a SWaTOL today and make this a year of growth and success! 

Product leadership: This is defined by products that add value to customers. An excellent example of product leadership is BMW. When you hear that name, you immediately identify it by the quality cars the company produces. BMW is a leader in putting together well-assembled cars. 

When you choose this Value Discipline, your focus is on Innovation.

State of the art products and services, high investment in research and development, create new categories, performance leadership, brand marketing, speed to market, high margins in a short time frame before fat followers can replicate, continual reinvention.

Customer intimacy: This is something that provides extensive, specialized service to you. It might be your doctor's office. It might be a local gym that works on building an intimate relationship with the customer. 

When you choose this Value Discipline, your focus is on EFFECTIVENESS

Deep understanding of customer needs, develop customized products and services, unique solutions, higher prices, close relationships, high touch customer service, decentralization.

Operational excellence: This described the execution of a business strategy that is consistent and reliable. Amazon and FedEx are great examples, as you know what to expect from both.  

When you choose this Value Discipline, your focus is on efficiency,

consistency, lower-cost structure than competitors, cost control streamlined processes, lower prices, supply chain management, no-frills, large volumes, reliability, speed, replicable at scale, and centralization.

You must know what game you're playing—if you try to be everything to everybody, your marketing strategy will be too broad, and your marketing spends, and support costs will be high. 

You will do far better if you narrow your focus. You should determine your best value discipline based on your ideal target market customer and what they value the most!

                                                                                             — Professor Phil Kotler 

And that's where I recommend you start. If you want to win, you're going to have to aim for the center—narrow your focus. If you go too broad, you'll be advertising to the masses, and it's very challenging to build successful business advertising for everybody. You want to delight the few to attract the many. So, it's crucial to start with and get extremely clear on who that target market customer is. 

When you have a clearly defined target market, your product, service, and offerings have much more clarity and focus. In other words, you know exactly whom you're building or servicing. When you have a clearly defined target market, your marketing communications are more effective, and you know exactly whom you're talking to. When you have a clearly defined target market, your customer or prospective customer perceives you as an expert at meeting their needs. They say, "This company's talking to me," and they're much more likely to choose you. 

So if you have not recently thought about your target market as we exit the pandemic, now is an excellent time to revisit it. Your marketing spends will be more efficient and profitable, and your entire business strategy will fall into place as you get your target market tightly defined.

A vision without a strategy remains just a dream. The major components of a Strategic Plan include:

1) Refining your Target Market 

2) Defining your Value Disciple, 

3) Your Key Benefits

4) Your Brand Promise

5) Strategic Positioning Statement

6) Identify Core Activities and Non-core Activities. 

7) The Five Competitive Forces Analysis  

8) The PEST Analysis 

9) The SWOT Analysis 

Nine components—sound overwhelming? It does not need to be. Simply take each of these components one at a time; they layer on top of each to create a robust strategic plan that will inspire your team and allow you to recognize success and growth!.  

Radical transparency is a term first coined at Harvard Business School two decades ago. It simply means that when everyone knows what is going on, they are happier, work together better, and achieve superior results. Try it in any aspect of your life. When your partner knows what's going on, your relationship is better. You're happier, work together better to solve your problems, and achieve a superior relationship.

Commonly, the threats to Strategy are from outside a company, often as reactionary steps taken to most off competitors or changes in technology.

While frequently from outside, the more significant threat typically comes from within. A sound strategy is undermined by staff as they take misguided stances against the competition, organizational failures, and the pressure to grow revenue. 

How do you avoid these two common reasons for the failure to execute your Strategy? You stop chasing rabbits! 

Mangers become unnerved about the competition and begin to emitate everything about the competition; throw in incentives, or lower the price to win the deal. And when it comes to new technologies, managers tend to chase these new technologies to give them the upper hand. 

It would be best to keep your team focused on the current Quarterly Strategic Initiatives. To do this, you must do a weekly strategic review with your team. During this meeting, provide a mechanism for escalating their new ideas regarding competition and technology and build a list of strategic moves with merit to be review during the next quarterly strategic planning session. I have found that the very best ideas come from my front-line managers; however, you can not flippantly jump from one strategic objective to the next. This is a recipe for strategic execution failure. It is likely chasing rabbits; there's one... there's another one... oh wait... there's another one. You will never catch any; in other words, you will not complete any of your strategic objectives.

1) Meet with your Executives and Managers' team weekly to keep them  focused on the Current Quarters Strategic Objectives.

2) Encourage Managers hell-bent on changing the present Strategy in favor of a new approach to provide concept details for consideration during the next Quarterly Strategic Business Review.

 Catch the Wave! - FREE Workshop:

If most of your dashboard numbers have currency symbols with them ($-£-€), you are most likely not measuring what matters.  Results are important, but you can not manage Results. What you can manage are the activity and effectiveness measures that drive those results. 

What Metrics should you measure? Metrics are what you use to measure the critical success factors that drive your present operating model; they drive business as usual and can improve what is.

How do identify powerful Leading Metrics?

Harvard Business Review, after the last financial recession of 2008/2009, did a study. It looked at companies in the three years after the financial crisis and there were some startling key takeaways:

 — Seventeen percent of the companies didn't survive the recession. 

 — Three years later, 80% had not yet regained their prerecession growth rates for sales and profits.

 — Only 9% flourished after the recession.

Who flourished after the recession?

 — Firms that cut costs fast and deep? - NO

 — Firms that outspent their rivals during the recession? - NO

Who did well?

According to the Harvard Business Review study, companies that mastered the delicate balance between cutting costs and investing in growing tomorrow did the best after the recession.

Within this group, HBR found that companies that deployed a specific combination of defensive and offensive moves had the highest probability—37%—of breaking away from the pack. 

As the pandemic passes, it is time to identify the opportunities, invest in them and flourish. The financial crisis has created a vacuum, and in that void, opportunities abound. Your challenge is to find them and leverage them. 

Join me for a rewarding FREE global workshop! This Strategic Planning webinar. "Catch the Wave". It will help guide you in identifying emerging opportunities as the pandemic subsides and leverage them for success in 2021 and break away from the pack in 2022.

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Beyond that, only about one in three small businesses get to the 10-year mark and live to tell the tale.

There's a particular reason for every failure, but they mostly ripple back to one underlying component, the lack of a strategic business plan. 

Procrastination kills businesses. But as the title of this article reads.. "it is not too late" read on to hear the Good News....

And it is never too late! Strategic planning is an iterative process, whilst companies that do put together a strategic plan typically do so in the weeks or months before their fiscal year starts do not wait until next year. When you have a strategy in place, you will begin to see immediate change regardless of when you roll out the plan. This change starts with employee engagement, and it will quickly cascade into growth and success. 

It's time to capture the success you desire and accomplish those lifelong goals, and it all starts with a Strategic Business plan. 

At ResultsBI, we make Strategic Planning Easy by offering Strategic Planning Master Classes.

New Zealand - Your NEW FISCALYear Starts in APRIL. It's not too late to put together a comprehensive STRATEGIC PLAN for Fiscal 2022

Australia - It is time to start thinking about your next fiscal YEAR. Your next fiscal starts in July. Make your Fiscal 2022 the year you need it too be.

United States - Canada - Ireland - United Kingdom - It's time to adjust your plan to drive recovery and leverage new opportunities as the pandemic passes. 

At ResultsBI, we make Strategic Planning Easy by offering Strategic Planning Master Classes. 

What I find most disturbing is how often this effort fails, not in determining a business's path forward but in not disseminating the information broadly and effectively to all the organization members, especially those who were not part of the decision-making team. To execute your plan, you have to share your plan and engage your team!

The first step in engaing your team is driving acceptance and agreement of your new strategic plan with your wider executive and management team. The second step is to elevate engagement and participation company-wide—a communication plan must be created and rolled out to everyone. 

First, provide an overview of the company's history, the previous quarter's results, and the upcoming quarter's major initiatives. Call a company-wide meeting every quarter focused on communicating your organization's strategic plan, either for the entire year or for the upcoming quarter. Introduce the group of people who were involved in putting together the strategic plan because you want them to know that this isn't just coming from the CEO and the CFO. You want to introduce the people that you've included as part of this process.

During the meeting, describe the basic principles of your strategic plan, as well as any new terms or definitions of terms. Show your team how strategy has played a part in the past growth of the company. They have to have a firm understanding that your company has put together strategies that it executes to success, unlike your competitors. In fact, over 75% of companies never put together a strategic plan at all. When you have no plan, you plan to fail. The more the staff and the employees truly understand what the plan is, the more buy-in you'll receive from them in the end. 

Provide key elements of what has led to your growth, the challenges you've incurred in the past, and how that has informed or helped guide you towards providing future direction.     

   

Clearly describe the company's strengths and weaknesses with specific examples, even if it involves mentioning the competition or calling out things that the executive team felt were weak within the company.  

This year is a greatly different year for most companies around the world. A successful year of recovery is a must for most. If you are carrying out your plans in a different fashion, you should communicate clearly that you've taken a new approach or have reworked the plan from the ground up. If you're not specific on how this year is different, you might have a tsunami of resistance against it before you've even begun. So, get ahead of the resistance by naming the difference—this will really help connect the employees to the plan.

Describe in detail how this strategic plan differs from the ones in the past. In other words, describe all the steps you've gone through that have gotten you to this point. Describe the SWOT Analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Making connection points with employees will give them a mental place to store the information you're sharing. Many companies are disconnected from their employees, and it directly impacts employee management, engagement, the ability to hold them accountable and drive execution.

Describe the plan. Start with your vision, which includes, of course, your BHAG, your core purpose, what you're trying to achieve as a company, and core values. Dive into your core values in detail—if they've differed from the past, spend a lot of time on them now. If you're restating your core values, give them more context. Explain what barriers could arise to prevent your organization from achieving its vision.

Outline the three major strategic projects that the company has chosen for this quarter and the barriers that might prevent your organization from achieving these strategic objectives. Outline the metrics that you'll be tracking to ensure that you're achieving your strategic project's execution. Remember, a strategic project has to be measurable—it can't be vague. You have to have a way to measure its success, such as with key performance indicators or KPIs. (Some methodologies call them OKRs, objectives with key measurable results or OKRs, but they are essentially the same thing.)

Finally, remember that all employees have a different level of understanding. They come from different walks of life and are filling different roles within the company. Your plan needs to be described simplistically, as does every aspect of it so that everybody clearly understands what you're talking about. I've seen strategic plans that get way too technical for rolling out at a company meeting—you're not talking development, accounting, or legal jargon. You need to put things in layman's terms so that everybody understands. 

Share your plan and engage your team; it's the first step to ensuring you execute your strategy!

No Plan Yet? - It's not too late. See the sidebar for more information about upcoming Strategic Planning Master Classes - A Strategic Plan for your company in just 4 or 5 Days. 

On the other hand, according to research, 70% to 80% of new businesses fail within their first year. The same study also found that half of those who survive the first year will fail within the next four years. And the number one cause of this failure? According to Dun & Bradstreet, the primary cause is a lack of business planning.

Yes, entrepreneurs and business owners do not plan to fail. Rather, they fail to plan (which causes them to fail).

So to plan, it is critical to your success!

The GOOD NEWS once you have a Strategic Plan is... 

Another study found that having a plan reduced the likelihood that a business would fail. Companies with a plan had better chances 

of success than those that had no plan.

Another study found that 75% of successful companies have a formal and pre-established system or software to share the plan with their employees and manage the strategic plan's execution.

To reinforce the connection between planning and fast growth, yet another study found that fast-growing companies—companies that had over 92 percent growth in sales from one year to the next—usually have business plans. In fact, 71 percent of fast-growing companies have plans.

I am passionate about helping companies put together a strategic plan and execute their plan. That is why nearly every week, I teach a strategic Planning Master Class live. — Over just 1 week, only 1 hour per day, I step you through the 15 important components of the assembly of a Strategic Business Plan. Furthermore, we will use the award-winning ResultsBI platform to assemble your plan! 

                                                                                           See the sidebar to learn more →

Walt Disney's original core purpose was simply to make people smile. He did that first with comic strips, then with animation, then with full-length animation, then with movies, then with TV shows, then with amusement parks. Your core purpose transcends your current product offering—it can live on

So I ask you...How does your organization define its purpose?

Why does your organization exist? What are you passionate about? What's the difference you're trying to make in the lives of the people you touch? And what is the essence of what you do for your customers? 

Being able to articulate your core purpose will provide context for many of your decisions. As you're making decisions and defining your strategy, ask yourself: Will doing this help us towards our core purpose?

Core values are the behaviors that define you, your executive team, your employees, and your entire culture. They become clear statements on how you expect every person in your organization to act, regardless of their role. They're going to provide a moral compass for your people and help the staff make the right decisions, regardless of the challenges they might face.

Vague words do not drive behavior, and generic aspirations do not create a winning culture. You need meaningful core values that drive actual behavior. 

The Kraft Group, which owns seven or more companies including th New Engleand Football Team have done incredible job of not using genric aspirations but rather providing clear statements defining thier core values. In fact just four precisley articulated core values;