Lack of Early Planning Solidifies the Status Quo

If you are you a business owner who knows where you want to take your company during the next five years, you most likely spend your CEO time developing the competencies and resources required for getting to the next level. You prevent early entrenchment of bad habits and attitudes, flawed processes and assigning the wrong people to key roles. You know that a well-designed strategy impacts customer experience, innovation, unique value proposition, target markets, products and services, process excellence, profitability, market share, customer relationships, hiring, training and partnerships. So, if this is you and you’re ready for the next logical steps …

Andiamo! Let’s Go!

Goals and strategies should remain consistent over a 3 to 5-year horizon but objectives and tactics must evolve annually. Start by establishing general destination goals such as company size, profitability, category position, geographic expansion, etc. Then, you’ll be ready to design your growth strategy. Is there an opportunity to do a better job of penetrating existing markets and developing new targets with existing products?  If these respective market penetration and market development strategies are not sufficient to achieve your goals, explore the feasibility of fine-tuning existing products and services and developing new products and services as a means for further penetrating existing markets and developing new target markets. Marketing and sales programs and processes should be aligned with the strategy. Design and execute your annual marketing plan and sales plan with short-term tactics aimed at achieving SMART objectives that will get you closer to achieving your goals each year.

Keeping things simple will help to avoid excuses such as “we’re not ready for this” and “this is too complex”. Follow a path that guides short-term thinking to be in sync with long term goals.