The business world is changing rapidly – you and your Strategic Plan need to keep up, to succeed.
How have your business Purposes and Values changed since you first started?
What are your short to long term goals and are they aligned?
Do you really know the current Strengths, Opportunities, Threats and Weaknesses of your business – or your industry?
What actions do you need to take now, to achieve your goals?
How will you implement your Strategic Plan?
We take you on a journey to refresh your Goals, assess your current business and plan, prioritise and implement practical actions that will help you seize your opportunities and manage your risks – and give you valuable advice along the way.
Strategic Planning can be overwhelming – but our carefully phased, comprehensive process allows you to progressively create the right Strategic Plan for your business, minimises your time away from the business, and gives you clarity and confidence.
Step 1:
This step helps us to quickly understand your business, gives us early insights into which opportunities and risks might need early attention, and provides you with fresh perspectives about your business.
Optional Add On:
We combine the latest industry data provided by IBISWorld, the Australian market leader for business research, with our own experienced analysis and insights.
Many of our clients choose this option at this Step, to help them understand:
Step 2:
We review your short to long term Goals pre-work across the Six Pillars, constructively challenging your ambitions, expectations and direction so that you know what needs to be done now to achieve long term success.
Step 3:
We compare your SOWaT pre-work with our Business Health Check findings (and our External Market Data Analysis, if you have chosen that option), to build a full picture of the risks you need to navigate to seize your opportunities. We also remind you of the real Strengths that you already have, and how to deal positively with the Weaknesses and Threats that may be keeping you awake at night.
Step 4:
We work through each of the Goals, Pillar by Pillar, to design and assign Strategic Actions for the next 12 months and identify where you might need support.
Step 5:
Implementing your new Strategic Plan may feel overwhelming – the temptation for most business owners is to complete everything straight away. To avoid burnout, we help you GANTT chart the identified Strategic Actions into a prioritised and realistic Critical Path to implement your new Strategic Plan. And if you need help from us implementing your Strategic Plan, we can tailor Advisory Services that are right for you and your business.
We’re always happy to explain more about our Strategic Plans and how they will help your business to sustainably grow and become more profitable and valuable.
Or, we can get started and begin the journey!
We’re always happy to explain more about our Strategic Plans and Business Consultations, and how they will help your business to sustainably grow and become more profitable and valuable.
Many clients find through their Business Health Checks that their existing Strategic Plans are no longer fit for purpose, so they would benefit from an update at the very least.
Our Strategic Plan clients have told us that our approach is very comprehensive and efficient and leaves them with the clarity and confidence to implement their prioritised actions. Where possible, we do incorporate any existing plans that our clients have into that process, to speed up the work and capitalise on previous investments.
In simple terms, a “business plan” shows what a business will do to become commercially feasible, eg how it will make money – that’s why lenders and investors often ask start up businesses for them, before committing funding.
For that reason, Business Plans have to include a lot of “tactical” information, eg around detailed pricing, specific business processes, individual risks, etc.
Once a business is up and running, Business Plans tend to be filed away, and business owners and leaders focus mostly on “working in” the business. Which is where Strategic Plans come in – they are the best tools to help business owners and leaders elevate their thinking back to the strategic level, from time to time.
For that reason, Strategic Plans should deliberately ignore most tactical issues, and focus on the actions that will strategically drive and improve business tactics, from the top down.
We’ve seen a lot of strategic plans over the years, and frankly most of them are too complex and cost too much, in terms of both time and (frequently) consulting fees. They usually try to do too much, use too much jargon and leave business owners and leaders deflated rather than inspired.
We have instead distilled the best practices that we have seen over the past 25 or so years, to come up with a simple, accessible model that efficiently takes business owners directly from their Purpose and Goals through the Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Threats of their businesses to a Critical Path of practical and prioritised Actions for the next 12 months.
And we also think that our Strategic Plans are highly affordable for small to medium sized businesses, who need these projects to pay for themselves quickly.
Clarity and confidence, in the simplest terms.
You will be clear on what you need to do, to strategically drive all of your business forward, because we use our Six Pillars Strategic Framework to ensure that all of your material business risks and opportunities are considered and prioritised. You will also be clear on what you can leave, because you can’t do everything at once.
You will also be confident that you can do what you need to do to make your business more successful, because we will challenge you to focus on the practical issues, and also suggest solutions that we know work.
We want our clients to do as much of their Strategic Plans as they can themselves, eg through the prework that we give them to complete. But we know from our experience that every business owner and leader needs someone who is independent to challenge their thinking along the way, to help them see opportunities and risks that they have lost sight of, or never imagined.
Our clients also say that they value the recommendations that we bring, based on our experience of running complex businesses and working with other clients. Its true to say that virtually every business problem has already happened to someone else, so it makes sense to tap into our experience of how those problems have also been solved by someone else, rather than trying to “reinvent the wheel” yourself.
When our clients purchase an Accelerate Advisory Services program that includes a Strategic Plan we are able to cover our project management and “Critical Path” consultation time across the full program – so those clients who are prepared to make that investment in growing their business get even more value for money.
