So you’re a small company and you think strategic management is a waste of time? You’re wrong! Strategic management is just as important to a small company as it is to a larger organization. In fact, during the early stages of your company strategic planning and long term planning and collaboration are imperative for the growth of your company.
When starting to plan for a new product launch in the 2012 season you must consider the 3 main questions to strategic management:
Three questions of Strategic Management
Where are we now?
Visualizing the future is important but before you can define how to get there you have to determine the current state of your business. Start by understanding where you stand on your current goals and objectives of the business. If your goal was to grow by 20% this year and it’s already Q4 and you’ve only grown about 10%, you need to understand what happened in order to avoid those speed bumps in the future.
Where do we want to go?
Once you have defined the current state of your business you can determine what the long and short-term goals of the business should be. Set both overall goals and granular department goals.
How will you get there?
As mentioned in a recent article: Six Key Elements to Effective Small Business Strategic Planning for 2012 you must determine the process behind how you will execute these plans and take accurate measurements of the progress being made.
Create Value and Opportunity Will Come
One of the biggest huddles in a small business strategy plan is creating the value needed to attain the goals of the company. Now, value can be in many different forms:
- Value to the customer to help growth
- Value to your vendors
- Value to the shareholders or investors
- Value to your employees
- Value to your marketing image
Once you have defined the values and benefits you can offer, the opportunities will come easier and in many forms to help get you to your overall goals.
Know Your Competition: Big and Small
During your strategic management sessions you will likely compare yourself to your competition. However, you must keep in consideration those companies both large and small so you can have a margin of where you stand with your competition.
Defining yourself against your larger competitors will allow you to understand what they did well to get to where they are as well as smaller competitors are not doing, therefore keeping them small.
Involve Every Department of the Business in Your Small Business Strategy
Finally, when developing your small business strategy you must consider all departments no matter how small and allow for input.
Transparency will allow you to grasp the pains and challenges of other departments and can offer you insight into the other aspects of the company which could be very beneficial.
Encouraging social strategy collaboration will allow everyone in the company to understand your new goals and will help define the processes needed to reach the end goal.
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