Are you ready to achieve your business's future goals, but unsure of where to start? For many companies, Strategic Planning is an essential, but daunting challenge. Strategic planning can be an intensive process that requires a number of essential resources and time from leaders across the business. Further, without the right solution to bring your plan to life, the plan you spent countless hours on may never make it off the ground. However, when done right, strategic planning can serve as a way to align your teams and drive accountability as your company takes the next steps toward being more efficient and effective. 

‍Elate can guide your team through the types of strategic planning and give you a leg up on the competition. By understanding your business and its current obstacles, your team can create a three to five year plan to prioritize what is most important and beneficial to business operations. So what is strategic planning, and how can you build a plan for your business?

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What is Strategic Planning?

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By focusing your business’s energy and resources, strategic planning allows you to establish priorities and strengthen operations within your organization on a quarterly or annual basis. This includes reaching common goals and desired outcomes while adjusting the business’s objectives to effectively respond to challenges it might be facing. To accomplish these outcomes, strategic planning allows your business to grow and develop across departments, which involves taking steps to:

• Understand the current business climate.
• Define your company’s mission.
• Create a three to five year plan.
• Recognize the current strengths and weaknesses
• Identify future opportunities and threats.
• Draft a roadmap to attain goals.

Strategic planning should lead to building a method to implement any changes your business wants to prioritize. Elate provides strategic planning expertise to build an individual plan for your company that meets its needs.

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How Do You Develop a Strategic Plan?

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A strategic plan is created by defining your organization's objectives, the steps required to attain those objectives, and any additional developments that come up during the planning process. Employees, consumers, business partners, and investors should be able to easily understand and implement these strategies.

Before you develop your strategic plan, you should assemble a planning team to ensure that your business’s goals and mission are met after improvement. As the process begins, you’ll need to:

• Appoint an impartial facilitator. Internally, this might be the Chief of Staff or member of your Strategy and Operations team. 
• Encourage creativity and problem solving.
• Designate a notes taker to drive accountability after the session. 
• Create an agenda to follow.

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Steps in Strategic Planning 

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After setting up your planning team, you might be wondering, “How do you write a good strategic plan?” These 5 key elements of strategic planning will ensure your business builds an effective plan of action.

1. Identify and evaluate the current state of the business. Consider where the problems lie by:

• Revisiting old strategic plans
• Auditing internal and external influences
• Identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

2. Prioritize what issues need to be addressed. After identifying existing problems, you’ll be able to:

• Organize desired goals
• Consider budgets and resources
• Measure business performance and KPIs

3. Develop a precise strategy to reach business objectives. A plan should include:

• Describing short and long-term business goals. This can be in the form of OKRs or another framework. 
• Crafting a strategic roadmap
• Defining key result (KR in an OKR) 

After the plan is completed, you’ll need to take steps to implement and refine the plan to adjust for any roadblocks or other opportunities.

4. Implement the newly created plan. Once the plan is approved, it should be followed with:

• Setting responsibilities of key stakeholders (like employees, managers, partners, etc.)
• Adjusting policies and processes
• Establishing measurement and reporting

5. Update the plan to adjust and reevaluate according to any opportunity changes. When revising, your business should:

• Determine any internal or external influences
• Review key metrics
• Take corrective action

If you’re looking to develop a strategic plan, Elate is the best software for businesses to realize their vision and track performance in one place. You can cut down on the manual work and allocate resources to ensure your business is running smoothly.

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How Do You Present a Strategic Plan?

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Once you’ve created the planning team, it’s time to introduce it to the company and board of directors for approval and implementation. The presentation should provide an overview of the plan itself and the steps to take action. Preparing for the meeting to communicate the plan is key to the successful start and effectiveness of the strategic steps you’ve laid out. Here are a few things to consider when arranging your meeting:

• Who will be there? It’s important to give thorough details necessary for each person involved.
• Descriptions of concepts essential to your plan. Don’t assume everyone knows specific terms and tools being used.
• Create context around how the plan fits into the past and future of the company. Examine past challenges and accompanying growth.
• How does the competition influence your plan? Describe competitive advantages and disadvantages.  
• Compare and contrast former plans and the new proposal. Plainly define the differences to ensure this plan will be successful.
• Clearly describe the plan. Lay things out step-by-step and include how they will lead the business to its mission and goals.
• Allow participants to ask questions. This will help anyone that might not understand some of the ideas to seek clarity. 
• Open up the floor for revision. Giving participants the opportunity to suggest changes will give you the options to fix any errors.

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Elate: A Software Solution to Strategic Planning

Elate is the all in one platform that brings your strategy to life. Built by Strategy and Operations Leaders, for Strategy and Operations Leaders, Elate helps high growth companies build, execute, and review their strategic plan to drive alignment and visibility like never before. We strive to help you build and implement the best strategic plan for your business to reach its goals. We give you a competitive advantage by aligning your team with collaborative software and providing progress tracking toward your goals with full transparency. Visit our website for more information about how we can help your business.

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