Strategic planning is an ongoing process for every business. It’s not something you implement and then shelve. Instead, your business should develop a guiding template that reflects your mission, internal culture, external factors, and objectives. This framework is designed to offer structure that keeps your business focused on taking goal-driven actions. Yet, it should be flexible enough to evolve over time. With a good strategic planning framework, your startup will have a repeatable and scalable roadmap for growth.
Key Takeaways:
The strategic planning process helps a business grow or achieve other objectives. A strategic plan is based on a model and guided by your startup’s strategic framework.
Startups use a strategic plan to ensure:
Strategic planning starts with understanding business intent and identifying growth goals. These goals should be concrete and detailed. They should also pass the SMART goal test: are your goals specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound?
For example, growing your revenue and generating more leads is too abstract. Increasing gross revenue by 18 percent over the next 12 months — with a minimum 75 percent client retention rate to help maintain profitability — is SMART.
A strategic planning model can then help you reach your SMART goals as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Your framework is the template that gives structure to your strategic planning, resulting in plans that are actionable, accountable, and effective.
Without a strategy framework, businesses risk problems ranging from budget overruns to department misalignment.
With such a framework, your startup can more confidently take the right actions — using the right processes at the right time — because you know what you’re working with and why you’re taking each action.
Your strategic planning framework should provide a solid structure for taking action and assessing results. It should also be flexible so you can use it indefinitely. It’s a dynamic document or template that your startup can use now— and in the future— to scale and accelerate growth.
These are steps for developing a framework:
The framework is the overarching roadmap. Within it, you’ll include the strategic planning process model and specific steps that work well for your business.
Keep in mind: there’s no perfect model. The model you use will depend on your niche and specific goals. You should also modify your model to align with your planning, resources, and culture.
Here are five strategic planning process models your startup can use.
This straightforward model is ideal for early stage startups because you can easily modify or build from it. It involves identifying a purpose and strategies, creating action plans to achieve those strategies, and monitoring and updating as needed.
This is a useful model for a more established startup trying to achieve efficient, scalable growth. The focus is on internal operations — a business will evaluate current processes and identify anything that needs realignment to achieve goals.
In this model, a business will focus on the most pressing issue or threat and then create a plan to stop that issue from inhibiting success. This model can also be used to capitalize on current opportunities and modify the strategic plan to leverage specific circumstances.
This highly-adaptable model can be a practical option for startups in industries that change quickly. It involves regularly researching and assessing internal and external factors and then adapting strategic planning around real-time events.
With this strategic planning model, the objective is to chart new waters by finding untapped markets or an uncontested niche.
With a well-developed framework and experience working with different strategic planning models, your startup can focus on goal-aligned actions and operate more efficiently.
Ready to leverage strategic planning through a framework? We are here to help!