Small business owners don’t always have the skills or understanding to plan strategically. Customer service, marketing pressures, and closing sales are all on the rise. Strategic planning, strategy, and implementation are rarely given the attention they deserve.
Once you’ve created a “growth roadmap,” it’s time to put your company’s strategic plan into action. Business reality, with all of their pressing responsibilities, might, however, lead to plan failure. The solution is not to work harder or to make the plan more important. Instead, the goal is to integrate the plan into the company’s current operations so that it may be implemented as part of normal operations.
When a company’s lengthy and difficult planning process is completed, the most common and lethal opponent of strategic plan implementation appears. When CEOs devote their whole focus to operating the company, their time is sometimes in short supply. Customers are having issues, suppliers are having issues, and stockholders are expecting speedy results.
This is without accounting for regulatory needs, legal difficulties, human resource requirements, and so on. The list goes on and on, and sadly, the strategic plan’s “dust collection” process often begins before the ink has dried.
Even when executives take the time to complete their plan, initiatives can fail as part of the company’s “to-do list.” When prioritizing projects, the challenge is to develop an effective strategy plan goals are virtually always considered “important” rather than “urgent.” And urgent initiatives, such as those with high customer demand or those that would boost cash flow, are frequently executed first. As a result, large efforts are frequently shelved as the year continues, and leaders must be prepared to explain why. It’s a tragedy for a company’s executive team to realize at the end of the year how little its strategic plan has been implemented.
Rather than attempting to maintain the plan in sharper focus or prioritizing implementation above more pressing business concerns, the long-term strategy is to incorporate the plan into daily operations. As a result, the plan’s actions will be broken down into multiple projects.
Attempting to divide a plan into “action plans” is the first step toward the plan’s effective integration. Consider the following scenario: You’re working on a project called “Create a Small Business Marketing Program.”
Five Distinct Action Plans:
- Determine The Things And Solutions That Will Be Required.
- Design Unique Presentation Materials
- Come Up With Marketing And Promotion Ideas.
- Make Contact With Trade Organizations That Are Relevant To Your Industry.
- Create A Sales Target List That Includes Contact Information
Assign Responsibilities:
The next stage is to assign responsibilities to each of the action plans after they have been created. While the marketing executive in the example above is likely in charge of the overall effort, each of the five action plans should be assigned to a distinct team. For example, the Customer Service team may be in responsible of action plan 1, while the Promotions team is in charge of action plans 2 and 3, the Sales team is in charge of action plan 4, and Sales Support is in duty of developing the target list. The fifth action plan
At this point, the concept is resonating strongly throughout the organization. Implementing timely action plan compliance as part of employee remuneration is another step toward integration. If members of these teams fulfil their quarterly targets, which include completing assigned action plans, they will get performance pay in addition to their regular wage. Similarly, one of the factors that goes into executive team salary could be the result of a long process.
Final Words:
This level of interconnectedness makes it unlikely that projects will be completed on schedule. However, implementation is neither sped up or given higher priority than other initiatives. Rather, it is dispersed throughout the company and factored into regular employee remuneration. While developing a strong and insightful strategic plan is critical, the company’s overall implementation of that plan can make all the difference!
