After the Strategic Planning

You’ve written your Strat Plan and you're proud and excited about it. You are eager to get going. It's going to give you the results you want.

Now what?

Many people write great plans and then leave them on the shelf because they aren’t sure what to do next.

Writing the plan is only the first step.

Testing

If you haven’t tested it as you were designing it, now is the time.?

Looking at the work to be done - all the tasks - are they doable with the resources you have? I’ve had clients plan to sell 100 widgets a week but only had a production capacity to make 60.

You may want to publish an article a week. Everyone extolls the value of writing on a weekly cadence, but if it takes you a couple of days to write it and you’re budgeting a couple of hours, you’re going to run into problems.

Does it make sense? You may have decided that you will look at your financials weekly, but that won’t work if your system isn’t updated weekly .?

Do you have the skills necessary? Or access to them? With our financials example, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you'll stop doing it.

Your final check is always a gut/heart check. Are you excited about the work involved in your plan? You don’t have to be doing cartwheels over every aspect, but it shouldn’t give you a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach, either. You may not like all of it, but you either have to be able to see beyond the task to the outcome or have in mind someone who loves that work.

Financials

So many Strat Plans are left high and dry because the budget or the cash flow aren’t there when needed. Or even worse, the work costs more than the value of the benefits of doing it.

Your financial plans must fit with your Strat Plan. You can’t show sales on one but not the other. You can’t show expenses on one and not the other. Your financial and Strat plans must be aligned and both tell the same story.

Project Management

Who is doing the work and when?

Project management is essential to getting the work done. You may be adding in work, taking it away or changing what or how it’s done. All of that needs to work against entropy.

Project management is thinking through and plotting how the work will be done, by whom, and when. Making sure that work that must happen first gets done first. Making sure the required resources are there to get the work done.?

You need good delegation practices, time management, resource allocation, motivation, problem solving,?and evaluation skills.

Get it Done

It's one thing to create a great Strategic Plan, it's another to work that plan. If you have done the work to figure out your best way to accomplish all you want to accomplish, it behooves you to get it done in the best way possible.

If you want help, book a call here to see if we can work together https://calendly.com/francesschagen/30min