Small business owners and managers don’t have a problem staying busy. There are always far more initiatives than can possibly be undertaken, new markets and products to explore, gaping backlogs of routine maintenance and organization waiting to be attended to. Strategic Planning becomes reactive instead of strategic.
With all the things you could be doing, what should you be doing? Making that determination requires stepping back and taking a broader perspective. Vaillus IT has a well designed model to help you with your strategic planning. We structure an analysis of what your business does, what it doesn’t do, and why to give new insight and make the path forward obvious. We have the expertise to translate that strategy into execution across the board because of our unique technology background. Call Vaillus IT at 918-734-7215 to find out the details.
Meet Your Stakeholders
Every business has numerous stakeholders. Customers, owners and investors are the reason you are in business. Some you get to choose like your vendors, business partners, and employees. Others get assigned to you by virtue of being in business like inspectors, auditors, industry advocates, government agencies. They might represent their own interests or they might represent a third party’s interests, but they all represent someone’s interests. Do you know what those interests are?
Small businesses can’t afford to chase initiatives that don’t return value to one or more stakeholders, so it is crucial to know what your many stakeholders need and why.
Our Strategic Alignment Model ensures your internal development initiatives and technology projects are aimed directly at understanding and satisfying the needs of your most important stakeholders in a way that keeps them on your side.
We start with the Stakeholders that get served by the industry you are in and your specific mission:
- Who are they?
- What interests do they have or represent?
- What values drive those interests or constrain them?
- How can you satisfy those needs in a way that would make the stakeholder your biggest fan?
It’s not that complicated, but often neglected. An OSHA inspector’s interest is to protect employees from harm. The values of the inspector are that work should be a safe place and that employees should be able to return home in one piece. Being able to produce training records, safety records, and safety procedure update records instantaneously would obviously impress the inspector. Asking for days to search through boxes for missing records would not. While there is upfront effort involved in making it possible, it pays a benefit in perpetuity in time saved, disruptions avoided, and goodwill with the inspector who also was able to complete the work more quickly.
Core Competencies
Next we ask how well equipped the business is to address the stakeholders needs. Every organization sets up functions to cover its required business activities. Some examples are:
- Building the business
- Administrating the business
- Operating the business
- Maintaining assets
- Customer Acquisition
- Customer Care
They are somewhat different for every industry. These are functions, not departments. Executing them cuts across departments, and each function has one or more stakeholders with one or more interests in how it gets done and what it produces. An OSHA inspector has interests in the production processes (operating), maintenance, and training (personnel feature of administration). Do your business units operate with the stakeholder’s interests in mind? Are ways to satisfy those needs built into business processes and done as a matter of course? Would a little more effort to go above and beyond turn stakeholders into raving fans?
A Strategic Approach To Strategic Planning
The gaps between what stakeholders need, or better yet what would thrill them, and what you are currently supplying provide the framework for internal growth initiatives and strategic projects necessary to close the gaps. Businesses spend a lot of time pondering how to thrill their customers with good reason. Often they forget to consider all the other stakeholders that might not ring the cash register. Ignoring some of these stakeholders routinely spawns fire drills and crises that cause real long-term damage. These disruptions are avoidable by accounting for all your stakeholders, understanding their values and desires, and having a plan to address them.
And you should address them. These kinds of avoidable surprises degrade your ability to scale because you remain in a reactionary state waiting for the inevitable next shoe to drop. It’s high time to rise above it and focus on the path from strategy to execution.
Easier Than You Think And Well Worth It
Our Strategic Alignment Model doesn’t take long to complete but is an indispensable tool to ensuring your strategy addresses the right issues in the right order and has the results you expect. Where there are glaring deficiencies, we can do a deeper dive to uncover more insight.
Call Vaillus It today at 918-734-7215 for a free consultation. Find out how easy it can be to have the insight you need to make the path forward clear when you work with the experts.