Your team can complete every project on its list and still leave the business no closer to where you wanted it to go. That is what happens when the work and the goals have stopped speaking to each other.
Before you approve another initiative, ask one question: what company goal will this help us achieve? If the answer takes ten minutes and considerable imagination, we may have a problem.
Strategy is a question you can ask
“That’s above my pay grade”. I dislike that phrase so much. It can become permission to stop thinking at the standard we can think at, or perform at, before we have even begun. You may need additional expertise or approval to decide, but that does not put the question beyond your ability to understand or contribute to it. In the same breath, a suit and a fancy CEO title do not automatically make you a strategist.
Strategy deserves neither intimidation nor casual confidence. It deserves deliberate thinking: Where should the company go, why is that destination worth pursuing, and how in God’s name are we going to get it there?
Think about school. Without a planned progression, you could learn colours, shapes and words, yet never learn to count to one hundred. Plenty of activity. A gap in what you were supposed to learn.
Your business can do the same thing. Launch products, recruit staff, redesign the website. Everyone is busy. But what is all that work building towards?
Understand what is driving the business
Before writing the company’s strategic plan, examine what is happening around the business, what drives its results and what it needs to improve.
First, assess the strategic context: the circumstances the company is planning within. Ask:
Are customers changing what they buy?
Are competitors offering something different?
Are costs rising?
What opportunities or pressures should influence the company’s decisions?
Identify which changes matter most and what the company may need to do in response.
Next, identify the business drivers: the factors that most affect the company’s results. These might include considerations such as repeat purchases, reliable delivery, access to skilled people or the cost of serving customers. Which factors have the greatest effect on revenue, costs and cash flow? Identify which need strengthening.
Then, assess the capability gaps: the difference between what the company needs to do to achieve its goals and what it can reliably do today. Perhaps the company wants larger contracts, but its team cannot yet deliver them consistently. Perhaps it needs more repeat customers, but has no process for following up after the first sale.
Identify what needs to improve: people, skills, processes, systems or resources. Those gaps help shape meaningful goals and the work required to achieve them.
Begin with the end in mind
The company’s mission explains why it exists and whom it serves. Its vision describes the future it aims to build. Its goals identify the measurable results needed to move towards that future.
“We want to grow” is a starting thought, not a finished goal. More customers? Better profit? Stronger customer retention? By how much, and by when? For a commercial business, bring those ambitions back to dollars and cents: sustainable profit, healthy cash flow and a worthwhile return for the owners, including yourself.
Not every project earns revenue directly. Some build capability or protect the business. But each needs a clear explanation of the value it creates, the cost it reduces or the risk it manages. Being proud of an initiative is not a business case.
Strategy also means choosing how the company will compete, what it will pursue and what it will leave alone. The activities in the plan should support those choices and reinforce one another. The strategic planning framework should make that connection visible.
Put the plan into one framework
The planning framework brings the company’s goals and delivery work together. Its columns connect programmes and initiatives to strategic objectives, strategies, outputs, performance indicators, targets and costs over time. The names sound formal. The questions behind them are straightforward.
Each part of the framework answers a practical question:
Strategic objective: What result do we want?
Programme: What related work will help achieve it?
Project: What specific piece of work must be completed?
Strategy: How will we achieve the objective?
Output: What will we produce?
Performance indicator: What will we measure?
Target: What level must we reach, and by when?
Cost: What resources will we commit?
An initiative is a general term for an organised effort to improve something.
Take a hypothetical service business whose mission includes dependable customer support. Its vision is to become a trusted long-term partner. Let’s say customers are leaving after their first contract, so retention becomes a priority.
Its objective might be to raise annual customer retention from 60 per cent to 80 per cent within twelve months. The programme is customer retention. One project is to introduce a consistent onboarding and account-review process.
The approach is to address problems earlier and demonstrate ongoing value. The outputs are an onboarding checklist, an account-review schedule and a renewal tracker. The indicators include customer retention and completion of scheduled reviews. The targets: 80 per cent retention and 90 per cent of reviews completed, with an illustrative annual budget of $7,000.
Enter these details across one row of the strategic framework, from the customer-retention programme through to its targets and cost. That row now shows how the work connects: the project supports the programme, the programme supports the objective, and the objective serves the company’s mission and vision.
But retention alone is not enough. You must now ask: Are the customers the company keeps profitable, and does the value of retaining them justify the cost? The budget must have a business case.
Make every initiative earn its place
Once the framework is filled in, check that the company’s goals and planned work actually connect. Test that connection in both directions:
· From the goal down: Every goal needs programmes, projects or actions that can deliver it.
From the work up: Every programme and project needs a goal it supports.
A goal without delivery work is an intention. Work without a relevant goal needs questioning.
That includes the quiet work: staff development, maintenance, compliance and better internal processes. Their contribution may be capability or protection rather than immediate revenue. Make that purpose clear.
Assign an accountable owner and a review date to each initiative. Compare actual results and spending with the targets. Completing the renewal tracker does not prove that customers are staying; an output is what you produce, while an outcome is what changes.
Put your strategy to work. Download the complimentary STRATEGIC PLANNING FRAMEWORK and use it to map three current initiatives against your company’s goals. For each initiative ask:
1. which goal does each serve,
2. who owns it,
3. what will it cost, and
4. how will you know it is working?
Keep, redesign or stop the work based on what you find.
Download it. Use it. Then tell me in the comments how it works for your company, where you get stuck and what you would like us to explore next in The Strategy Room.
Your strategy is the method and architecture for reaching that end goal: the choices you make, the work you organise and the resources you commit. You should be able to trace every initiative back to a measurable goal, and every goal back to the company’s mission and vision. If that line breaks, your budget may be funding activity rather than progress.
A beautiful mission statement cannot pay the bills. The work beneath it must justify the investment.