Strategic Planning

Now that you have decided to share, for a price, your product or service with the world by starting your own small business it is time to make a plan. A successful business must be built on a strong foundation. The first step in building that foundation is to develop a strategy for obtaining your goals. One way to accomplish this is to create a strategic plan for your business.


A strategic plan is a long term plan and overview of your business. You can improve your chances for success greatly by coming up with a good strategic plan. Strategic planning is a tool used by business owners to remain proactive and to respond promptly to environmental changes. A good strategic plan will assist you in avoiding treats to your business, and will provide you with an idea of what is to expect in the future. The insight that you will gain from strategic planning will assist you in obtaining your goals.

Writing a strategic plan is a six step process. Step one, formulate your mission statement. Your mission statement should be a description of the reason that you started your business. Step two, complete an environmental analysis. This is the process of gathering all the information that you can about the possible environmental factors, within and outside of, your business and using that information to formulate a plan to handle the types of situations that you expect to be facing in the future. Step three, perform a competitive analysis. It is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This process will help you determine your competitive advantage. Step four, analyze your strategic alternatives. This is the process of identifying problems based on the information that you have gathered thus far in your planning process. Step five, set your goals and strategies. At this stage you set goal for you business and then put in place the plans to get you there. Step six, set up a control system. A control system is a process that is built into your strategic plan to assist you in pinpointing the problem when things do not go as you planned.

When determining what to include in your businesses strategic plan seek suggestions from as many sources as possible. Seek out the opinions of colleagues, bankers, lawyers, and other executives to aid you in the planning process. Make sure that the plan you come up with is one that you will follow. Be realistic; don’t set impractical goals for yourself. What good is to have a plan if you are not going to follow it? Lastly, be flexible. Change is constant in business as well as in everyday life.