Corporate Strategy

Corporate strategy is not one of those things that you want to be tinkering with all the time.  However, it does pay to review your strategy on an annual basis because the world is changing around us.

Begin with the end in mind

Take the opportunity to reconnect with why you are in business in the first place.  What were your thoughts when you first set out on this journey?  What did you want to achieve?

Pull out the business plan you drew up all those months and years ago.  Are you on track?  Is it still relevant?  Pull out the SWOT analysis.  Have you capitalised on your strengths?  Have you taken your opportunities?  Did you do a PEST analysis?  What is happening right now in the world that impacts your business?

Pull out your competitive analysis.  Are your competitors still the same?  What are they doing differently to what they did before?  Is the industry still competing on the same drivers?  Will it be tomorrow?

Knowing what you know now, where would you like to take the business?  What is the end game?  If we are at Point A, what is point B?

Gap analysis

Assuming you can define Point A (where you are now) the next step is to conduct some basic gap analysis – how will you get from Point A to Point B?  What are the things that need to be done?  What stops them from being done?  How can those challenges be overcome?

10-5-3

Once you have defined your ‘end-game’, confirmed your strategy and conducted some gap analysis, you will need to set some priorities for the year ahead.  You will most likely be able to think of lots of initiatives.  Try to boil it down to the top 5 and then eliminate two more.  Implementing 3 initiatives in a year is more than enough.

Why do this before 30 June?

Changes in strategy need to be incorporated into your budgets for the year ahead.

TIPS FROM OUR TEAM

• Avoid short-term thinking in your strategy planning.
• During this phase, beware not to confuse causes with symptoms. To find the root cause of an issue, you usually have to work through five levels of why.
• Benchmarking against competitors can be an interesting exercise but don’t let your competitors define what it is possible.  Athletes break records by striving to be the best they can be, not by striving to be as good as their competitors.  It’s the same in business.

FOR MORE ABOUT CORPORATE STRATEGY PLEASE CONTACT OUR OFFICE ON 1300 656 141