The Importance of Strategic Planning in Business

Graph Strategic Planning

There are so many businesses that are struggling today, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, only 1 out of every 20 businesses becomes profitable and survives 10 years. There are many reasons for this statistic, but in this blog post I wanted to focus on just one of the reasons, the lack of a strategic plan. A strategic plan can be defined as the strategy and process a business will pursue in an effort to head in a specific direction.

There is a quote by Lewis Carroll that demonstrates the importance of having a specific direction, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there.” This is the way many entrepreneurs and business owners run their business, without a specific strategic plan for their company. As a result of not having a plan, they usually end up going through the motions of their daily operations until one day they are faced with an obstacle they did not foresee and is too great to overcome.

My goal is to help business owners realize the importance of setting a strategic plan for their company, followed by specific goals in order to push their company in the direction they desire. Through the use of key performance indicators (KPI) a business can measure their progress towards their goals. (I will write more about KPIs in a later blog post, so be sure to subscribe).

A strategic plan does not have to be complicated. You can start off with a simple plan that will lay out how the company will grow in the upcoming years. After you have a core plan in place, you can build on it by starting to include specifics pertaining to your product/service types, marketing strategy, etc. The important thing is to have a plan in place for you, your manager and employees to work toward so that everyone is on the same path. Once everyone in the organization is working on the same goals the business will continue to achieve new successes.