Strategic Planning

At a fundamental level, the material purpose for any project is to transform energy into value. From a capital perspective, positive income requires positive outcomes.

Strategic planning matches your assets to both sides of this transformation while also looking for ancillary outcomes that can be recycled – so that positive outcomes create more positive income. Strategic planning carries the project beyond the anticipated products or services that are advertised and digs into the tangetial value your main project creates. With the right strategy, you can compound the potential of your operation and grow in a healthy and creative way.

All enterprises begin with energy – charm, charisma, novelty, enthusiasm, passion, inspiration – and the end result of a business or project is to transform and channel that energy through skills and techniques into a product or service of value – something worth paying money for.

Armed with both vision and an inventory of resources, you are ready to tackle strategic planning.

Vision translates into the bullseye your business will strive for, while inventory reflects the actors involved in the process. The strategic plan is all about positioning and pivoting so that the orientation of assets and resources flow together as a productivity engine. When resources are not aligned, misdirected or improperly accounted for, turbulence hits the engine – operations become slow, heated and expensive. Ideally, you will find ways to recoup and recycle energy spent during the process to preserve momentum and keep cashflow going.

Does your project run like a dry engine? A change of strategy is like an oil change – it keeps the parts running smoothly – and along the way it pays to make note of pressure points – parts of the operation that can tolerate a lot of deviation or leeway, and parts that need to be by the book in order to keep things running. We also need to assess any holes or gaps in terms of sustainability and scalability.

How consistent is your linear process?

This is going to look different for every project, particularly when your ultimate end result is a product, a service, or a hybrid of both. Preferably let’s assume that after having carved out a single aim, you’ve got a final core value you want to produce.

If you have not developed a core value proposition, this is where the outcome of your vision is crystallized by one clear, simple statement. While it sounds a bit silly when shared this way, in your head it pays to complete the thought: ‘All I want my project to do is…’ Don’t worry about the side effects or the bonuses or risks at this time.

Begin with the basics: What are your inputs and outputs?

Extend your inputs – what channels feed into your input? For a sales pipeline, a simple list might be:

• Organic Leads
• Referral Leads
• Outreach Leads
• Distributor Demand

Each of these channels also has an input and an output that offloads into multiple buckets – the desired output and its by-products, the undesired output and its by-products, etc.

While the desired output is fairly obvious, the undesired output is not necessarily as transparent. For a sales pipeline output, some undesired outcomes may be:

• Client Fatigue
• Swift Market Changes
• Unfit for Purpose
• Fragile Goods
• Personal Injury
• Wrong Information/Deception

Handling these channels and understanding where technology might convert those undesirable outputs into positive inputs or mitigate their impact is critical to the scalability and sustainability of your project. The more you can transform burn to churn, the better.

Can you collect and redirect feedback on these processes?

Positive and negative outcomes can both be redirected, and many of the previously negative outcomes can be addressed with new technology.

Whether it is facilitating poor communication, providing extra self-help or AI assistance, getting information out faster or facilitating replacements or repairs faster and more reliably, momentum redirection and recovery is one of the strongest suites of technology solutions.

Technology provides more catch-alls for alternative, unknown or unexpected outcomes, while also looking for actions that bring additional value back into the project. A big part of any successful project is getting actors who receive value from your project to be active in continuing to generate value for the project in other ways. This compounds the value of the project as a whole and will encourage the project itself to grow beyond your initial expectations. There are a lot of projects that benefit from technology – but far more often it would be impossible for a lot of projects or busienss to run profitably at scale without them. You can probably think of a number of companies that started in the red for many years because they invested in the rails that would eventually underlay the entire industry.

If you want to be an innovative competitor, you must be able to thank and play the long game, be patient, have foresight, but also have the courage to cross the bridge to the future as you cross it.

Who is the competition? For an innovator, the competition is the unknown circumstance – innovators hunt black swans. For the status quo, the competition is the one who they try to push from a sideline position to the back. They are the folks who come in an make their money after the revolution has begun. They are not the pioneers with enormous risk tolerance and en eye for the future.

There is not a right or wrong way to be, and successful strategies exist in both cases. Innovators may reap larger rewards but that is a reflection of the risk tolerance they have and their willingness to slog through the early adopter phase of consumer exposure. The status quo provides great solutions for the mainstream adopters – it earns modest return from a safe and stable consumer base.

Operations at different lifecycle stages need different types of strategic outlooks, and it’s important to be able to assess where you are in the product cycle, who your main customer base is, and what sort of strategy matches your base. When a project is just starting, it has a bit more liberty in choosing what level they wish to engage the industry at – though as time moves on it’s pretty clear that a lot of very large, well-established companies often have a huge upperhand over innovaters when it comes to the mainstream consumer base. It gets harder and harder every year to break through into the mainstream, which means every project needs to have a dash of innovation, niche discovery and high risk tolerance.

Nothing generates more momentum than a new specialized product or service executed well and backed by a solid customer service experience

Regardless of the flavor of your strategic approach, all of these aspects of the outcome should be considered and that momentum redirected with intent.

During the course of developing a strategic plan, it is important to be realistic about the limits of the assets and resources you have. Built into the plan should be a timetable for improvements. Technology needs upgrades, personnel can improve skills – quality naturally breaks down and decays without maintenance. There may also be gaps that you could fill with resources you have in the short terms, but as growth picks up it is clear those resources will not hold up.

The two primary areas where it will help to establish timetables for improvement – enchancement goals – are in the human resources you have on the your team, and the quality of the content you have to represent the value that you offer.

Last modified on Sep 3, 2023 (2 years ago)