ALIGN STRATEGY BUSINESS PLANNING PROGRAM™ STEPS

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The first phase is about updating and enhancing levels of situational awareness.  What is your existing and projected business context?  We examine your current resources, approaches, plans, values, business beliefs, products, services, operations, HR, marketing and competition.  We consider applicable regulatory, environmental, social and technology trends.  We’ll also gather input from your key stakeholders around their personal goals, preferences and business insights.   

From there, we’ll get an initial sense of your main internal strengths and weaknesses, along with the potential external threats and opportunities to be considered. We will also identify your key competitive advantages (around cost and differentiation) and improve understanding around how these might be strengthened and leveraged to more effectively seize attractive external business opportunities.  Lastly, the Context portion of the plan is reviewed and improved through feedback from the leadership team.

In the second step, we will select the blend of corporate objectives that are most likely to achieve your key stakeholders’ goals.  Stakeholder goals often include items like employment participation, succession, investment income, exit or partial liquidity, growth of capital and future legacy.  Do you want to utilize a purpose-driven strategic approach around sustainability?  The corporate vision and objectives we choose must also be realistically achievable given the firm’s internal capabilities and its external context.  Objective time horizons must also be considered, defined and incorporated.  Other important strategy elements are what we call “pathway goals”. For instance, if medium-term profit growth is an objective, then pathways goals might include launching new products and improving distribution channels. To wrap this step up, draft corporate objectives are assessed, improved and finalized by the leadership team. 

With deeper understanding and clarity around both the cards we've been dealt (Context) and what the business needs to achieve (Objectives), we can now smartly turn to choosing the best ways to strengthen the overall strategy and maximize success.  Your highest impact strategic initiatives will be driven by your top strengths, and how well they match up with, and enhance your ability to seize, appealing external business opportunities.  Main strengths and advantages will be based on the unique resources and superior skills you possess that can be used to reduce costs and be more attractive to clients.  Essentially, we need to determine how best to build and leverage your competitive advantages into a corporate mission that will outperform your corporate objectives with minimized and acceptable risk.  The recommended initiatives will be reviewed for additional input and approval by the leadership team.

In this last business planning step, the rubber hits the road with a documentation and communication framework that makes execution and monitoring as easy as possible.  We will ensure your plan is very clear, concise, and easy to understand around exactly who is accountable for which initiatives and outcomes, and over what time periods.  We will build a strategic plan road map that clearly identifies your context, vision, objectives, purpose and mission.  It will also integrate strategic pathway goals and specific initiatives for each department to focus on.  To be well-implemented, each project for improvement and ongoing program must also include all the necessary details, priorities, timelines and responsibilities.  To monitor implementation and performance, we will recommend quarterly outcome milestones and deliverables, along with overall dashboard metrics and a strategy evaluation scoring methodology.