Strategic planning tends to be seen as a mountain, an unwieldy, complex process, with a clear start, but an unclear end, the outcome of which will collect dust on the shelf.
But it can be a hugely beneficial and relatively simple exercise, if you have the right recipe.
Éric Préville has the ingredients for this recipe. A graduate in management accounting, CPA, CMA, and MBA, he guides entrepreneurs at key points in the development of their business so they can reach their goals for strategic growth, profitability, or passing the torch.
Mr. Préville wants to convince you to launch a strategic thinking exercise, and he succeeds in his efforts: you just need to spend 20 minutes listening to want to throw yourself body and soul into this amazing adventure.
Why strategic planning?
According to a BDC study, 70% of businesses that plan strategically see greater success.
Operating without a strategic plan is like hitting the road without a GPS or a destination. You’re moving, but not necessarily in the right direction. And since you don’t know where you are going, you will never know when you have arrived.
A strategic planning exercise makes it possible to define the foundations of your organization: the type of clients you want, your products and services, and whether the value proposition, business model, and other fundamental factors are the right ones.
Éric Préville points to 6 reasons to engage in strategic planning:
- To take a step back and make your vision official.
- To better understand your ecosystem.
- To identify innovative, high-performance strategies.
- To make informed choices about resource allocation.
- To plan, control, and adjust at the right time.
- To offer meaning to employees.
Steps in the process
Having a clear vision of the process demystifies and structures the effort. For Éric Préville, strategic planning involves 6 key steps.
1/ The will. Without it, the exercise is destined to fail. If you undertake strategic planning without a real will to break with the status quo, there is no point: it will only result in frustration, and nothing positive will come of the effort.
The management team has to be committed to the process and have the courage to ask tough questions.
2/ The organizational DNA. Who is the organization? What is its mission? What is management’s vision? What values drive it?
These questions and others determine the essence of a business and must be clarified at the beginning of the exercise, along with the value proposition, social responsibility, and the organization’s ambition.
3/ Introspection. To know where you want to go, you need to know where you are. The introspection stage – a type of diagnosis – shines light on strengths and weaknesses, reveals opportunities and threats, and reveals the political, technological, and legal environment.
4/ Priorities. The diagnosis makes it possible to tease out challenges, avenues for improvement, in short, to have a clearer vision. Next you decide what to tackle as a priority, set objectives, and establish major strategic directions. This is obviously a crucial step.
5/ The business model. The previous step provided direction; now you need to ensure you have the right business model for your strategy. Is the one you have used so far still appropriate? Does it have to be adjusted, even completely rethought?
Éric Préville recommends the Business Model Canvas, a simple yet powerful tool that makes it possible to show on a single page the 9 key components of a business and how they interact.
This is the stage at which you would review the added value of the offer and the strategy.6/ Responsibility and tracking. Developing a strategy is great, but it is nothing without the final step: the quality of execution.
To execute properly, two things are required:
- an action plan, with targets, indicators, and owners.
- a dashboard with key performance indicators (KPI) to track progress – nothing complicated, but it is crucial that it be kept up to date and consulted regularly.
Some conditions of success
The success of a strategic planning exercise is measured in the medium term. Of course, the exercise in and of itself is often highly beneficial in the short term (it is an excellent opportunity for team building), but it is after a few months, even a few years, that the journey fully pays off.
For this to happen, Éric Préville insists that you need to take action.
Next you need to ensure you free up individuals with key responsibilities for implementing the strategic plan. If these people are overloaded, they can’t put the necessary time and energy into implementing measures.
It is also important to get buy-in from the group. Communication is fundamental. Employees have to be stakeholders in the changes, so they need to understand and share the organization’s vision and orientations.
Finally, the action plan has to be reviewed periodically, once a year at least, more often if the ecosystem sees major change. Are you still headed in the right direction? Do you have the right people in the right place? Are there new threats you need to deal with or opportunities you need to seize?
Things change quickly these days. While strategic plans normally cover three to five years, you need to regularly stop and check your course.
Do you need guidance?
Most organizations would benefit from the guidance of an external facilitator. This person oversees the process, freeing up people internally, so they can devote themselves to thinking and coming up with ideas.
But with or without external help, strategic planning is an organizational superpower. And by following Éric Préville’s steps, what appears to be a mountain becomes a mere hill, one that is easily climbed, at the summit of which the view offers an invaluable perspective on reality.
This article was drafted after watching the webinar “Tackling your business strategy in 20 minutes,” led by Éric Préville, CPA, CMA.
In partnership with the Ordre des CPA du Québec, Evol presented a series of four webinars on topics related to business accounting and finance. It is our pleasure to invite you to watch the recordings available in the Toolbox section. Enjoy!
