(Welcome to Day 2 of Miles & Company’s Completely-Shamless, Semi-Shameless Subscriber Drive. For the next five days, our email subscribers can share our stuff and win big ole’ buckets of crazy swag prize packs that include tools for doodling, learning to write gooder, and caffeinating themselves to creative oblivion. All the rules are here. Only our email subscribers are eligible to win… because they’re all unfairly awesome… if that describes you too, why not sign up for our short emails, too?)
In the methodology we created called The First Order Of Business, everything’s built on the goals and values of your company. We shared our best advice about goals and values yesterday. Once they’re solid, you need a strategic plan.
STRATEGIC PLANNING
How are you going to accomplish your goals using those values? You need a strategic plan to create systems, policies, and procedures that factor in not only your values, but also things like:
- Your competition
- Your market potential
- Your limiting factors
- Assets you may not be leveraging
- Blind spots
- Human resources
If your goals are realistic, and your values are true, the strength of your strategic plan will ultimately determine the strength of your brand. Do you have a clear path to where you want to go? Without one, horrific amounts of money can be wasted… your money. And that would kinda stink, wouldn’t it?
THE MCo BEST OF STRATEGIC PLANNING
Since we have so many new readers this week, we’d like to point you to our very best stories about strategic planning. DON’T PANIC! Like all of our stories, these are short, practical pieces of advice that typically take no more than 2-5 minutes to read… but you may think about them all day.
Strategic Planning Made Simpler – Strategic planning is simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. There’s no magic bullet. There’s no pill you can take to replace hard, thoughtful work. Let me try and simplify it for you.
A Shockingly Accurate Way To Calculate Market Share – I’m guessing you don’t know how much your competitors are doing each year? I bet you’re wiser than you think.
No To A Thousand Things – Focus is about saying “no.” Not just to bad ideas. To good ones. Ask Apple.
Where’s The Bottleneck? – Ready to improve your organization immediately. Ask everyone in the company the following question…
Positioning Wedges – Most powerful advertising comes from systems, policies, and procedures that differentiate you from your competitors in your customers’ eyes. Here’s an exercise to develop them with your team.
No Pantywaste Guarantees! – The only thing worse than not having a guarantee? Having a pantywaste guarantee. Jack up your warranties next week. Create BHAGs. Your business will grow. I guarantee it.
Boom. Done. – Once the planning is done, you have to be prepared for Strategic Doing. Here’s Strategic Doing Made Simple
The Impact Of Simple Sequencing – How do you benefit as a company from a great brainstorming session? The answer is in sequencing — a concrete sequence of events that will accomplish that idea.
When You Don’t Have All The Answers – Ask good questions. These are the 30 strategic planning questions we ask of every client. Many of them are referenced and even given more depth in other parts of our website, but this is the big list.
(Over the next five days during our subscriber drive and contest, we’ll be sharing our very best advice with you. We’ve used these strategies to help unleash awesomeness in hundreds of companies and thousands of people… but BE WARNED… this is the diet-and-exercise of business growth, marketing strategy, and personal branding and development. You have to be willing to do the work. If you are willing, amazing things can happen. If you aren’t already a subscriber, why not try us for a few days?)
Leave a Reply