Feeling Stuck Starting 2025? Use This Strategic Planning Guide to Move Your Business Forward
15 January 2025
Got big plans for 2025? Feeling excited and clear about what success looks like for you and your business this year? Have you documented the key outcomes and the steps needed to get you there?
Strategic planning can help you break that cycle. It’s not just for large corporations—SMEs can benefit immensely from a well-defined plan that creates clarity and helps you move toward specific goals. Many small business owners feel overwhelmed by the idea of strategic planning, or think it's not for them, but with a practical approach, it can be the game-changer you need.
Why Planning Matters
Without a clear plan, it's easy for SMEs to get lost in day-to-day operations without making real progress towards their long-term goals. Strategic planning helps prioritize what matters, aligns the team, and provides a clear roadmap to achieve business objectives. It’s a proactive approach that ensures your business adapts and thrives even in changing market conditions.
Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Strategic Plan
Define Your Vision and Mission: Begin with the big picture. What do you want your business to look like in the future? Define your mission—your purpose—and the vision that inspires your long-term goals.
Identify Key Customer Groups, Cohorts, and Personas: Gaining clarity about your key customer groups is critical. Documenting customer cohorts and personas helps you understand their needs, pain points, and behaviors. This clarity allows you to tailor your strategic plan, marketing, and operations to serve these customers effectively, ensuring your business efforts align with the people you are trying to reach.
Review Product Offering as It Relates to Customer Personas: Review your product or service offerings to ensure they align with the needs of your customer personas. This involves assessing whether each offering addresses the specific pain points, preferences, and challenges of your target customers. Ensuring your product offering is tailored to your key personas is crucial for effectively meeting their needs and driving engagement.
Set Clear Objectives: Break down your vision into specific, measurable objectives. For example, increase revenue by 20% or enter two new markets within the next year.
Define Your Objectives and Goals: Your objectives are the high level outcomes you want to achieve under each of the Nine Pillars within your business and the goals are the key actions or steps you need to take to achieve your objectives. Think of these as the individual projects that will get you from where you are today to where you want to be.
Wildly Important Goal (WIG): Choose 1 or 2 Wildly Important Goals that can be focused on. This ensures execution on your plan so that there is razor focus on your current WIG which can be completed and ticked off so you can move onto the next goal.
A strategic plan is not a “set it and forget it” document. Review it regularly—quarterly, if possible—to measure progress and make adjustments as needed.
Practical Tips for Strategic Planning
Involve Key Stakeholders: Gather input from partners, department heads, and other key players. The more input you get, the more robust your plan will be.
Start Small: If the idea of strategic planning seems daunting, start with a simple one-page plan and build from there. Simplicity is better than inaction.
Use our online "Roadmap To Scale - Online Strategic Planning Tool that walks you step-by-step through our Strategic Planning Process
