Business and Strategy Consulting
A strategic plan is essential for every business. It tells the stakeholders where the company is going and how it plans to get there. Many companies may have one but is used more often as a one-off reference document than a guiding note for the conduct of the business. As such many strategic planning become a futile exercise and the document even if made, ends up only as a reference document. The offer for consulting on this topic is to work towards establishing a culture within the organization of making a proper strategy document and to ensure that the conduct of the business is towards achieving the well laid out strategic objectives. For this, there must be a well thought out process and an implementation initiative. This job can be done in house, but it is a matter of focus and impartiality. In specific, the following services can be offered:
- Elevator pitch – A well made out document covering the key details of the company to articulate about its business, priorities, objectives and vision and mission of the company.
- Mission statement – What is the business trying to achieve? Guides the management team to take the right decision in the light of the strategic objectives that the entity has set for itself. Guides all external parties associating with the entity and other stakeholders of what actions are likely to be acted upon by the company.
- SWOT Analysis – Analyze the strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats. Helps determine the best opportunities to pursue for achieving the corporate goals. It helps to identify the strengths and of what needs to be developed in future.
- Goals – Set the goals to achieve. 5 long years roadmap broken into annual execution plans is the most common strategy documentation period terms.
- KPIs – Helps identify achievement of goals. The annual plans need to be translated into KPIs. KPIs are the specific key indicators that need to be achieve within a fixed time frame like the monthly growth in sales, GP % to sales improvement, no: of leads to be closed, order pipelines generated etc. These rolls up to the annual plans which rolls up into the deliverable strategic plan.
- Target customers – Marketing / Sales efforts and new product / business development to all lead to customer service and targets. Needs of each target group calls for attention.
- Industry analysis – Working towards the market and customer identification is the key to success. Market size, market fit, market potential and opportunity to grow are the key details to be considered for an effective strategy road map preparation.
- Competitive analysis and advantage – Help identify the strengths and weakness of competition. Work around the strategy to capitalize on the company’s strength Vs the weakness of competition and to work on unserved market as potential space for the company.
- Marketing plan – To make a meaningful spend strategy to achieve the goals set while ensuring the retention and efforts made to maximize the lifetime value of customers.
- Team – Assess the team strength for execution of plans, help in filling up the gaps, coach and measure the performance to ensure execution on ground. Like any other input needed, the team strength should be planned and ensured.
- Operations plan – Translate the strategic plan into goals for operations by different teams from within the organization. Goal based targets will help ease the execution of strategic plans.
- Financial projections – On achieving the objectives of strategic business plan, what will be the financial outcome. These projections will help measure and track the achievement against plans.
- Executive summary – The narration will help keep all key points of the strategic intent in one place so that all users will be on the same page as they work together to achieve the strategic objective of the company.
Can make an end-to-end strategic roadmap, articulate, and communicate well, record the actual performance, measure deviations, analyze the reasons and recommend course corrections within a short time frame for the achievement of long-term strategic objective.