Good Questions Equal Great Business Strategy

Reviewing your existing business strategy, or creating a business strategy for a new business venture, should not be seen as a complex and difficult task by any business owner or business manager. In fact, the process itself can be invigorating and exciting, and if done well, will certainly make your business and personal life somewhat easier, over the next twelve months.

Unfortunately, most readily accessible literature on this subject is focused on the development of business strategies by large corporate entities or similar sized public enterprises, and what little guidance is around for the SME business owner is still overly theoretical, and in my view far more complex than it needs to be, or the simplicity of suggested methodologies is far from adequate in being able to make a real difference to business outcomes.

In reality, the process of reviewing an existing business strategy, or creating one for a new business, can be distilled into an easy three part process. Firstly, asking and answering the right questions in respect of your business, secondly, collating all of the answers and grouping them into a small number of specific strategies, and thirdly, identifying all of the tasks which need to be performed to successfully implement each strategy.

So what are the right questions that you firstly need to answer? I suggest that the following nine questions should always be asked, and answered in a comprehensive manner, as the first part of the process of developing a new business strategy.

1) What business arena are we really operating in, and is this the business arena we want to operate in?
2) What market(s) do we want to serve with this business and which particular customers/clients?
3) What outcomes do we want to achieve in the next 3, 6, 9, &12 months, and by year 2, year 3 etc?
4) What resources will we need to progressively apply in the business to achieve these specific outcomes?
5) What actions need to be taken and by whom to gather these resources so they are available as needed?
6) What management and support structures will we need to initially have, and progressively upgrade?
7) What tools will we need to put in place to measure and report progress?
8)  What external reporting requirements will we need to comply with, and how important are each of these?
9) What don’t we know, that we need to know, to manage known and unknown future risks?

Robust analysis of the answers that flow forth from the above process, and the grouping of these into relevant subject headings, will allow the second phase of the development of your business strategy to be finalised.

Ideally, the information so gathered, will allow you to quickly prepare a range of specific tasks for each of the following strategic areas;

1) Customer/Client Acquisition and Retention Strategies
2) People Acquisition and People Management Strategies
3) Resource Acquisition and Resource Management Strategies
4) Organisation Capability and Organisation Structure Strategies
5) Financial and Capital Management Strategies
6) Legal and Regulatory Compliance Strategies
7) Public Relations and Stakeholder Communication Strategies.

Once the full range of tasks has been identified for each of the strategic areas it is an easy matter to complete the third of the processes involved. That is the placing of timelines, costs or budgets, and responsibility for completion of each task to an individual or a team, against each specific task.

When this is completed your new business strategy is ready to be pulled together, documented, disseminated and put into action.

Do you have a strategic plan for your business?

If so, is it time you reviewed it and looked at it from a new angle?

If not, will this article provide you with the impetus to create one and run your business within its structured boundaries?

Opportunity for meeting SME Online needs.

This blog is based on personal experience over the last three weeks. It may provide an eye opener for those who are technically savy and can't for the life of themselves understand why any SME business would resist fully embracing the internet age.

Having taken my own business online over the last three weeks, I now understand more clearly why many SME businesses do not fully embrace the internet and take advantage of all that it offers to them as business owners.

I found that the work involved for anyone who wants to do it themselves is quite considerable, and that is only what is necessary to establish a low level base for a future bells and whistles platform, once sufficient experience in the online business environment is obtained and the funds are available to go down that path.

The work included, but was not limited to, purchasing a domain name, building a complete website, setting up e-mail accounts in the new domain, constructing a comprehensive profile on LinkedIn, signing up for Skype and configuring that system to operate in a personal computing environment, incorporating all Skype add-ons, signing up for a blogging service and setting it up to operate in conjunction with the website, taking and incorporating digital photographs into the website, Skype and LinkedIn, sourcing an online design company to design a company logo for the website and for other electronic forums and then incorporating same where required, selecting and configuring an on-line CRM package, selecting and configuring an e-mail marketing package, and creating a newletter template.

The hours allocated to the tasks listed exceeded three full working weeks and there are still a few small corrections and tweeks which need to be made to finalise the first stage of getting our consultancy business online.

The $ cost involved was minimal, less than $500.00 all up, but without 20 years of computing experience, and significant exposure to online business through other activities, it would not have been possible without calling in specialists to do most if not all of the work.

I would hazard a guess that the cost for a SME business owner to outsource all of the necessary work would see a cost of at least 10 times and up to 20 times what I incurred being charged for all of the work involved.

Having to project managing the exercise would also cause a lot of hassle for the business owner and it would be unlikely that the same result could be achieved within three weeks from first deciding to take a business online if most of the work was outsourced.

Understanding just how busy most business owners are on a daily basis, and how tight cash flow can be especially in difficult economic conditions, I now have a clear understanding of why so many SME businesses have not embraced technologies which we all know they should be embracing.

Perhaps their exists a great opportunity for an IT company to put all of the required elements in one box, include clear instructions, and get it out into the market at a price which would encourage a high volume uptake of the offering.