Mastering Strategic Planning for Entrepreneurs: Build a Roadmap to Success

All entrepreneurs need to find a process for creating, evaluating and updating their strategic plan.  While there are many writings on this subject – the fact remains that you need a straight-forward, easily described process for creating and maintaining these plans. This can take shape in several ways, but gathering your leadership team and important advisors is always a great first step.

set long-term goals

Having a current plan gives a roadmap to follow and helps keep you on track. You can set priorities and then see them unfold over time. Of course any great plan needs to have a structure and allowance for evaluation, realignment or an entire redrawing, depending on challenges and progress that we find along the way. This prioritization process allows you to evaluate the options at hand (often too many to narrow down) and decide where you are going to focus to generate the results you need.

Sitting down and getting really clear about where your company is going helps to craft and communicate the long-term vision that you the founder have for your business.  Goal setting becomes easier and clearer when the big steps you want to take have already been outlined.  It makes it possible to see how these goals can cascade down through the company, ensuring that the team is evaluated on their progress towards their part of achieving these goals. Other advantages include understanding the competitive landscape, preparing for unexpected challenges and focussing the limited resources that you have available to make the progress you need to see.

Strategic planning in a small business

At Mabel’s Labels we consistently had more ideas and opportunities than we could effectively chase and implement. So, we needed to prioritize how we wanted to spend the company time and energy to meet the growth goals that we set.  Evaluating our capabilities, the new team members we needed to move ahead, the competitive landscape, our own SWOT analysis helped us to set goals that were challenging to achieve, but within reach.  From there, we could build HR plans and financial projections and budgets. These meant we knew we could afford what we were looking at, and that we’d have the right team in place at the right time to achieve our goals.

Stay Flexible

Over the years, the process became more detailed and more refined. As entrepreneurs, we were always conscious of not backing ourselves into a plan that lacked the flexibility we wanted to take opportunities that presented themselves, while crafting something that gave the business the stability it needed to continue to grow.

Over time, we created our Vision and Mission as well as our Core Values. These things helped us evaluate opportunities and ensure that the ones we chose to follow fit into the big picture for the business. We created and then reviewed our SWOT analysis, looking at where we were strong, what our weaknesses, opportunities and threats were and how those impacted the plans we wanted to make. We assessed our own data. We reviewed market trends. Then, we created a budget and timeline, laying out the milestones we wanted to hit, funds needed and any new team members that would be needed to help us get there.

Early on, we had some help from one of our key advisors in walking through this process, and we would typically be able to create the plan with one full day session.  In the later years, this process would occur over a couple of full day sessions, scheduled a few weeks apart. We did this, so that we could ideate and create a high-level plan, then go and do the research needed to nail down the exact things we wanted to do. It was important to ensure that we didn’t over-plan leaving ourselves too little flexibility, and that we scheduled quarterly check-ins to assess our progress.

It's important to say that in those early days, we weren’t sure exactly how to tackle planning – so we engaged some of our experts to help us. Once we had the rhythm, we were able to do it ourselves, bringing advisors and our leaders to the table to help us craft the best plan we could. 

Begin Now

Start early – it’s important to begin the exercise of planning, even if you feel you aren’t sure how to go about it, and especially if you don’t think you have the time to devote to it.  It will clear the way for you to move forward quickly as you understand where your priorities are and what budgets are available for you to use in making your dreams come true, while acting as a business growth framework to guide you on the path.