I’ve written extensively about why your business should have a one page strategic plan. Now I’m going to walk you through my process for creating a strategic plan for myself and my clients.
Knowing exactly what to write in your strategic plan can feel challenging. You’ll want to work through each section below separately and in order.
Don’t get caught up on word choice and editing at this stage. The goal, for now, is to explore each section and get the ideas flowing. Not sure where to start? Talk it through with a colleague, mentor, or partner to get some ideas flowing.
What is drives you as a person? Why did you start your business? What do you care about the most?
These are deeply personal questions that are essential to this process. Your individual drivers and values are likely the foundation for your business values and are key to your long-term happiness and sense of fulfillment. As a fan of Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, I believe that keeping your values and purpose at the center of your business creates greater personal fulfillment, attracts like-minded employees and customers, and leads to greater success.
What problem does your business solve? You’ve probably seen this question a million times, but do not take it lightly.
To answer this question, you need to know your ideal customer, their problems, and what motivates them. Identifying your ideal customer may be a work in progress if your business is newer and will likely evolve. That’s OK! Start with where you’re at and keep working to refine it.
What does your business stand for? What does your business value most? These may be an extension of your personal values, but it is important to define them separately. Your values should relate to your purpose and help shape how you execute your strategy.
Because a well-defined purpose is so important, I’m going to walk you through two examples for a personal training business.
Company A: We are personal trainers. We help people who have struggled to lose weight and look their best. We value health and making personal connections with our clients.
Company B: We are personal trainers. We believe improved physical fitness increases our clients’ quality of life and happiness through increased confidence. Our ideal clients are professional women in their 30s and 40s who have a history of weight cycling and want to have a healthier lifestyle. We help clients live a better life through improved physical fitness and healthier eating, leading to losing weight and gaining confidence. In addition, we value making personal connections with clients, which means we create customized plans to fit the life and goals of each client.
Companies A and B are similar companies with similar values, but Company B has a stronger statement. Why? Because they understand that their clients are looking for more than just weight loss – they want to be healthier and more confident. Both companies also have similar values, but Company B has gone a step further by what they do to live out those values.
As a customer reading these statements, I know right away if I will fit well with Company B, but Company A is a mystery for me. A marketer will have a clear picture of how to market Company B, but Company A is vague. Is Company A going after aspiring fitness models or women looking to lose the baby weight? Maybe it’s both. As a CPA and business advisor, I can tell that Company B offers a premium service to a customer base that is probably less price sensitive. I would expect higher than average rates for the industry and more ability to raise prices when necessary. If company A is looking to raise prices, I’ll have a much harder time forecasting the effects of the increase.
What are you really good at? What is your business the best at? What is your company doing that nobody else in your space is doing? The most important thing here is to think outside of technical expertise. A personal trainer who says they are the best at fitness isn’t unique. Even if you are at the very top of your industry, something more specific should set you apart.
I’ll use my own business as an example here. What makes CenterFocus different from other accounting firms is our humanized approach to accounting. I understand that accounting and taxes are profoundly stressful and emotionally unpleasant for my clients. I respect and empathize with these feelings so that my clients feel safe working with me and aren’t afraid to admit when they don’t know something or have a difficult time. My work isn’t necessarily different from my competitors, and there are certainly more experienced and technically proficient accountants out there. What’s unique is how I build relationships with my clients and how they experience my service.
What do you want for your business long-term? Do you want to grow your business and sell it? Do you want to have a high net worth? Are you looking to live a comfortable life doing something you love but aren’t all that worried about getting rich? If you have specific ideas – great, write them down. If not, think about the life you ultimately wish to live.
Once you have a good idea of where you’re going, decide on a reasonable timeframe to get there. For example, if you’re 25 years old, want to have a net worth of $150 million, and currently have more debt than assets, twenty years might be a reasonable timeline for you. Next, come up with some intermediate goals, in this case, five and ten years, to figure out what it will take to make you feel like you’re on the right path to your main goal. As your goals get closer to today, they should get increasingly specific and actionable.
Short-term goals need to support your long-term goals and plan and should be very specific and actionable. Now is a great time to use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound) goal setting techniques. These goals define what you will focus on for the following year. There is no “right” number of short-term goals to set. For example, you might have one main goal, increasing net income, to $500,000 for the next year to support your ultimate goal of selling the business and starting a non-profit dog rescue with the proceeds. Then, based on this goal, you might set supporting goals related to inbound leads and profit margins. Alternatively, you might be taking your business in a new direction due to industry changes and have several different goals related to different areas of your business. What matters most is that achieving these goals will get you closer to your ultimate long-term vision.
Setting short-term goals presents an excellent opportunity to get input from your team. Of course, as the leader, you’ll want to set the priorities and long-term goals, but your team will likely have valuable information about how to get there. For example, let’s say you want your business valued at $5 million in five years to prepare for a sale. To meet this goal, you need to double your sales in the next year, which is challenging but possible based on your history. So what’s the best way to do this? First, talk to your marketing person and find out if they have ideas to generate more leads. Next, talk to your CPA or financial advisor to determine if you can improve processes to increase your sales figures. Finally, ask your employees for ideas and insight into your customers that you might be missing.
What is happening outside of your business that will impact you in the short or long run? Maybe your industry is facing an increase in automation and tech startups. Perhaps current events, like the pandemic, are making significant and lasting changes to your industry. You might not have all the answers right now. That’s OK. The purpose here is to help look at what’s happening around you. If you can identify actions, work them into your goals and strategies.
Your business strategy outlines how you will achieve your goals. I like to start by creating a high-level strategy for achieving my long-term goals. Beginning with a long-term strategy helps me make sure that I will stay true to my purpose and values over time. Then, once I have my long-term strategies outlined, I work to create focused short-term strategies to achieve my more immediate goals.
Questions to ask yourself in this stage include:
If you answer yes to question one or no to questions two and three, this is the time to step back and reevaluate your goals and strategies.
If you have conflicting strategies, you should first reevaluate your goals. Does it make sense to focus on each of these goals simultaneously? Do you need to re-prioritize? If the goals still seem OK, can you change your strategies to be more complimentary? In the end, you need to make sure your goals and strategies work together to move you towards your long-term vision.
Suppose your goals and strategies are not consistent with your mission, purpose, and values you need to reevaluate. These elements are critical to your long-term success and happiness and should not be compromised.
For example, I work with a non-profit outdoor organization. During recent budget deliberations, the board needed to decide if the organization should continue to offer a particular service. Although the service benefited families, it did not support the organization’s financial goals. Since the board created the financial goals to support the long-term goal of expanding so that more people could experience nature with my client, the decision was made to eliminate the service.
It wasn’t easy because we knew whom the decision would immediately impact. In contrast, we do not personally know the people who will benefit from the long-term expansion. However, once it became clear that offering the service now would do less to support the mission in the long term, it was also clear what had to happen.
If you have done an excellent job with goal-setting, how you measure success should be clear. You should be able to identify:
Your optimization plan should tell you who will be involved in improving operations and how you will identify opportunities for optimization. If you have specific goals related to efficiency and optimization, you will likely already have many optimization details. If not, I suggest having a general idea of how you will optimize when opportunities present themselves in the coming year.
What resources and team members do you already have to help you execute your plan? Naturally, you’ll think of people within your company first, and that is an excellent place to start. These people should share your values and mission and be tremendous resources if you’ve hired well.
But what if you don’t have anyone else working with you in your business, or you don’t have the right people internally to support your plans? This is why I like to take a broader approach to identifying resources and team members. You likely have a community of people who can help you. Are you a member of any professional organizations or groups that can provide mentorship and technical assistance? Is your CPA or other financial professional able to advise you on your financial goals? Do you have friends and neighbors with expertise who would be willing to help you out? The more people you include, the more abundant your resources become, and you will be less dependent on one person for success.
One of the top stressors I hear from small business owners is feeling alone or doing everything themselves. It’s an easy trap to fall into and one I’ve struggled with myself. The good news is you don’t have to do it all alone. I have found the small business community incredibly supportive and helpful. As I have opened my mind to who is on my team, I’ve found an abundance of help is available to me.
Once you’ve done all the work (and it’s a lot), it’s time to put everything together in one place. Now it’s time to work through each section to edit and refine your work. Since you’ll be doing a lot of editing, I like to start by making a copy of my original document. That way, if you edit something out and want to go back to it, you’ll have access to everything.
Make sure your main ideas are clear and concise as you work through each section. Your one page strategic plan is a tool to share with the people on your team, so anyone who reads it must be able to understand you.
I should also note that your plan may not be EXACTLY one page. That’s OK; one page isn’t a hard and fast rule. The idea of a one page plan is that it should be easy to read. If you need a page and a half or two pages, no big deal. If you start to get any longer, I would suggest reviewing your plan to make sure:
Creating your first strategic plan is a lot of work, especially if you’re not dialed in on your vision, mission, and values. The good news is, now that you’ve gone through the whole process, you’ll have a much easier time updating your strategic plan next year.
First, I suggest checking in with yourself on the vision, mission, and values to ensure that they hold true for you. Next, you’ll want to revisit your long-term vision and goals to ensure it’s still what you want and make changes based on your current progress. Finally, you’ll want to update your short-term goals and strategies annually, as well as evaluate external trends.
If you need help, I include this work as a part of my financial planning and advisory services to a limited number of clients each year. If you’ve been in business for at least two years and are ready to invest in growing your business, schedule an introductory call to find out if we’re a good fit.
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