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Get strategy at the heart of your successful business

Putting strategy at the heart of your business activity should give you greater direction and focus and lead to stimulating, profitable opportunities. A well-thought-out strategy is crucial for navigating challenges and capitalising on opportunities.

Businesses that have clear objectives or goals, robust accountability, and a shared sense of purpose should always outperform those that just show up and go through the motions. This focused approach ensures that all efforts are aligned towards achieving common goals, thereby maximising efficiency and effectiveness.

The Importance of a Strategic Plan

Strategy lies at the heart of most successful businesses. 

To achieve this, you need to resource and execute with purpose. Unfortunately, few businesses have a strategic plan or a robust planning process. 

Changing this situation should be a top priority. A strategic plan not only provides a roadmap for your business but also helps in anticipating challenges and preparing for them.

Business Strategy Tips for Business Owners

To help you get started, here are two top tips for putting strategy at the heart of your business success.

1. Process Creates the Plan

Getting strategy at the heart of your success will require you to carve out some time, get a process started, and shake things up. There’s no better time to review and tweak your business model, future-proof compelling services, and get your strategic building blocks in place.

Just as every good strategy has key elements, every good plan needs a step-by-step process. In fact, the process is often just as important as the plan itself. 

A strategic planning retreat with your core team is a great way to start the process – find a spot offsite to get the creative juices flowing such as a beach, a park, or a vineyard, and set an agenda.

2. Key Elements of an Effective Strategy

The key elements in a good strategy normally incorporate:

• Vision: This is a statement that identifies what a company would like to achieve or accomplish. A clear vision provides direction and inspiration, helping to align all members of the organisation towards common goals.

• Values: These are the fundamental beliefs upon which your business and its behaviour are based. They are the guiding principles that your business uses to manage its internal affairs as well as its relationship with customers. Strong values build a solid foundation for organisational culture and decision-making.

• Objectives: These should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timebound). Having both short-term and long-term objectives ensures that your business stays on track and can measure its progress effectively.

• KPIs: Key Performance Indicators are measurable values that demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. KPIs help in monitoring performance and making informed decisions.

• Actions: These outline what needs to be done to meet the objectives. Make this simple and clear to ensure that all team members understand their roles and responsibilities.

• Owners: Delegating tasks to specific owners ensures follow-through and accountability. Assigning ownership of tasks helps in tracking progress and maintaining responsibility.

• Deadlines: Setting deadlines for when your actions will be complete ensures you make progress. Deadlines provide a sense of urgency and help in prioritising tasks.

It doesn’t need to be much more complicated than that, but do invest the time and effort in doing this right. 

A proactive, value-add strategic model will need fresh thinking, debate, research, and open conversations. Enjoy and embrace the process, and you should end up with a good outcome.

Implementing Your Strategy

Implementing a strategic plan requires commitment and consistent effort. Here are some additional steps to ensure successful implementation:

• Communication: Clearly communicate the strategy to all members of the organisation. Ensure everyone understands their role in achieving the strategic objectives.

• Monitoring and Evaluation: Regularly monitor progress against the set objectives and KPIs. Evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy and make adjustments as necessary.

• Flexibility: Be prepared to adapt your strategy in response to changes in the business environment. Flexibility is key to maintaining relevance and achieving long-term success.

• Continuous Improvement: Foster a culture of continuous improvement within your organisation. Encourage feedback and use it to refine your strategy and processes.

Seeking Professional Guidance

Great planning requires a guide, facilitator, and/or professional expertise to be as robust as possible. We can help your business and guide you through the steps. Professional guidance can provide valuable insights and ensure that your strategic plan is comprehensive and effective.

Putting strategy at the heart of your business activity should not only give your business greater direction and focus but also lead to stimulating, profitable opportunities. 

It’s time to get started on creating a strategic plan that will drive your business towards long-term success. By following these steps and seeking professional assistance when needed, you can build a solid foundation for your business and achieve your strategic goals.

Talk to us about how we can support your business strategy and help you achieve your objectives. 

Making the most of business data

Are you recording, measuring and analysing enough of the data being generated by your business?

With so many apps and digital solutions now available to businesses, there's a wealth of useful data to trawl through – and plenty of hidden insights for you to benefit from.

Here are 5 ways to get more insights from your business data

1. Track your business finances

Managing your business accounts used to be something you left to your finance director. But with cloud accounting now the norm, every business now has 24/7 online access to detailed information about its financial position and performance. Deeper analysis and insights are usually available at the click of a button, helping you spot the pitfalls and potential opportunities.

Your accounting platform can show you:

• Profit & loss reports and balance sheets, with real-time data to help decision-making
• Cashflow forecasts and projections, to help plan your future cash position
• Budget tracking and spending reports, to stay in full control of your expenditure.

2. Review your credit score

The credit risk rating your company is given by the big credit agencies can have a huge impact on your ability to borrow. A high risk-rating will mean that banks and other lenders will be reluctant to offer you funding. And suppliers will be less open to offering you trade credit.

Some credit bureaus, like Experian, now offer ways to check your business credit score. With a better understanding of your credit data, you can take action to improve your score.

To get in control of your credit position, you should:

• Find out your current credit score and how this is impacting on your ability to borrow
• Check out your payment history and take action to improve performance
• Regularly check this credit data to track improvements or drops in your score.

3. Monitor your sales and marketing data

Steady sales revenues are a must for any business that wants to grow, but how much oversight do you have over your historic and future sales data? Using a sales and marketing platform like Salesforce helps you track your sales, campaigns and customer relationships – giving you a goldmine of data to sift through and analyse:

Key data areas to analyse will include:

• Which products and/or services are making the most sales, and why
• Which customer demographic is the biggest spender, and why they’re advocates
• Which campaigns are delivering the best return on investment (ROI).

4. Track your staff performance

Your people are one of the company’s most important assets. But do you really know how well your employees are performing, or how engaged they are with the goals of the business? Today’s HR software makes it easy to set core skills and capabilities and track how each team member is performing over the course of the year.

As an employer, you can:

• Set performance and training targets, and see how your employees are tracking
• Run satisfaction surveys and staff feedback to check in on team engagement
• Use your data to drive improved performance and happiness in your workforce.

5. Measure your performance against targets

One of the big benefits of tracking your business data is the ability to measure your performance against a given target. Whether it’s a budget target for a new department, or a sales target for a new marketing campaign, you have the performance data at your fingertips. This helps you motivate the team, work towards a common goal and ‘gamify’ your progress as a business.

If you share these targets and performance data with your people at monthly team meetings, this transparency can work wonders for motivation. When your employees, management team and executive team are all aiming for the same goals, you’re a more effective team.

Talk to us about getting more from your data.

Transforming your company into a digital business may seem like the end of the process. But the reality is that getting in control of your data sharing, analytics and performance tracking is the genuine goal for any ambitious business in 2023.

We can help you connect up your app stack and focus on analysing the most important data for business success.