STRATEGIC PLANNING

In everything you plan to do in life, STRATEGIC PLANNING is required. If you are going to buy a house, you need strategic planning. If you are going to look for a new job, you need strategic planning. Obviously, you don’t stop and say, “I’m going to create a strategic plan to change careers,” but consciously or unconsciously, you take certain actions that make you feel more prepared and confident at the moment of action.

And that is exactly what you need to develop when you think about starting a business, restructuring an area you manage, or taking on a leadership position. From the moment you begin a strategic planning process, you already start learning through it and improving the way you think.

Where do you start a strategic plan?

Let’s assume you want to start your own business. The first thing you need to think about is: why do you want to start a business and become an entrepreneur?I usually emphasize that we need a very clear purpose in life to start a business, because otherwise, we won’t even make it through the first few months. At the beginning, it’s hard to understand this, but over time, you do find your purpose and begin working toward it. And it cannot be only about money — it involves professional fulfillment, personal fulfillment, and financial fulfillment.

In the next stage, and connecting this with your personal goals, you need to identify what you want to deliver to your future customers. Opening a store just for the sake of opening one will certainly make it just another business in the market. You need to create unique experiences so that customers see you as something different. Human beings are attracted to novelty, and when this novelty is well executed, it is what will set your business apart from the competition. Have you ever heard of UX?

Neil Patel, on his blog, explains that UX design is the practice of creating a good user experience across websites, applications, and other products, online or offline. UX stands for User Experience. It is a strategy focused on delivering experiences to consumers through responsive, pleasant, organized, and intuitive design. The UX designer aims to evoke positive emotions in users across different environments, such as physical points of sale or mobile applications.

Based on this reasoning, you begin to develop your STRATEGIC PLANNING. Every plan is designed to take you from one point to another. Today, you don’t have your business yet, but you intend to start one — strategic planning will help you think through how this process will unfold.

At this stage, another concept is introduced: SWOT Analysis, also known as the SWOT Matrix, where:

• S = Strengths

• W = Weaknesses

• O = Opportunities

• T = Threats

  
  

Applying SWOT analysis within your strategic planning is quite simple. Strengths and weaknesses are analyzed in the internal environment, where you have control over the situation and can improve indicators through deliberate actions. Opportunities and threats, on the other hand, involve the external environment — you don’t control them, but you can take actions to leverage or mitigate market conditions, whether positive or negative.

How do you use this within planning?

1. Identify what you do and perform successfully

2. Identify what you are not very skilled at

3. Identify market opportunities

4. Identify threats you may encounter during this process

   
   

Notice that everything must be connected to your strategic planning. This business-building process provides the foundation needed to understand where your best area of operation will be.

After all this mapping, what you need next is to build your action plan, now using another management tool: 5W2H, which in practice looks like this:

(5W2H framework)

In this way, you have mapped out the entire strategic planning process for opening your business or managing the area you are responsible for. And this planning applies to any activity in which you want to move from one point to another. It applies to everything.

In a practical and efficient way, check out my eBook Practical Strategic Planning to help you organize your ideas logically and coherently.

Kelly Galvão

Commercial Management Specialist