Preparing for your future company sale begins with having the right plan
What can businesses learn from the military as it relates to strategic planning? It’s that strategic planning is the military mantra of having situational awareness and operational effectiveness.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do we have great situational awareness of what is going on inside our four walls?
- Do we have great situational awareness of what is going on outside our four walls?
- Based on this situational awareness, do we have a good plan for operating effectively?
Executives often don’t tackle strategic planning because they don’t know how to…so they put it off. Or they try to tackle it but over-complicate it. Here is an effective broad approach to tackling your company strategic plan:
- 1. Situational Awareness – Assess inside the four walls of your company
- What is our historical financial performance
- Where are we strong in the market, where do we have challenges
- What value does our customer derive in working with us
- How do we serve our customers uniquely versus the competition
- Where is our team/organization strong and where do we have challenges
- 2. Situational Awareness – Assess outside the four walls of your company
- Is our market growing, flat or shrinking
- What will future economic projections mean for our product/service
- What is our customers decision criteria in deciding whether to issue us a PO
- What technologies are impacting our industry and how can we leverage them
- How might our customer buying behavior be changing in the future
- What are un/under-served aspects of our market by ourselves and our competition
- Where could a competitor disrupt us? Where could we disrupt our competition
- 3. Operational Effectiveness – Where do we want to go with our business
- Where do we want to go long term with our business – what does good look like in the future
- What does our internal Situational Awareness tell us we should improve upon
- What does our external Situational Awareness tell us we should improve on
- What new products or services could we launch
- What new markets/subsectors should we expand to
- What changing needs do our customers have, how could we meet these
- How could we become more productive/efficient in how we fulfill on our product/service
Strategic thinking and planning are the ultimate muscle you want to build at your company. Doing so will help you build something special, something that a future acquirer will pay you a premium for one day. Use time as a friend and begin building this muscle today.