How Do I Create a Strategic Plan?

1. Celebrate your successes from last year. Identify what made you successful by answering these questions: Where did your clients come from? What marketing strategies worked? How did you adjust expenses to help your cash flow? Where did you grow as a leader? How did you best support your clients and provide value to them?
2. Create a Vision Board with your vision for this year. Ask yourself these questions: What is your dream for this year? Who have you clearly identified as your ideal client and how will you reach them? What is a new idea that could exponentially grow your business? What resources will you need? What areas do you need to grow in for leadership and team development? After you have answered these, draw out the responses or use magazine cutouts to create your board.
3. Write your strategic plan and include your mission, vision, values, key objectives and quarterly SMART goals. Work backwards from your yearend goals to ensure you know what it will take to make it happen. Download our Ascent Plan if that is helpful.
4. Break it down by asking yourself: what will you choose to do monthly, weekly and even daily to ensure your success? Map out your monthly marketing strategy and project your finances in a budget that has clear rules for spending and saving. Try to find the answer to how many “money-making” time blocks (we call this “green time”) with clients will you need to make your goal. The more you can tell yourself what you are going to do the more time you will give yourself; this helps to take the emotion out of decision making.
5. Measure and adjust. Keep in touch with your goals by seeing how you are doing and what you need to adjust. Watch for the “80/20 rule”, where are you getting 80% of your results? How can you focus on those tasks? Business owners who adjust their goals dependent on ROI willearn more revenue and gain more time. Also, post your strategic plan where you can see it on a daily basis.
6. Surround yourself with other positive business owners that will hold you accountable to your goals and will encourage the best of you. Just like every business cycle, undoubtedly, there will be hard times. The key to overcoming this is not seeing that the problems are bigger than you, but rather, looking at the situation and knowing that you are bigger and can move through it with success. Understanding who you are and leaning into your own intuition and strengths will differentiate you from the rest and it will increase your confidence as a leader.