At UHY Haines Norton we have our internal strategy day with the full team on an annual basis. And today I will be facilitating the Gladstone Chamber of Commerce annual strategy session in my position as President.
It is essential for every business to have a strategy in place – even if it is a one-page basic strategy it is a lot better than having nothing! The saying goes if you fail to prepare, you should prepare to fail.
Some simple tips for preparing a strategy for your business can begin with reviewing historical results and performance. This can help identify what has worked well in your business and anything that didn’t perform so well and from here you can make decisions on expanding and /or contracting in specific areas of your business.
Seeking feedback from customers will also give you an insight into how others perceive your business and its performance. It can also help identify any additional products or services that you could offer to customers which in turn could help grow your business.
The next stage after this review may be setting targets for your business for the short, medium and long term. This could be regarding sales, profits, expanding services or winning new clients. The targets should be the result of things identified in the review stage.
The most exciting part of the strategy preparation will be the what and how you are going to achieve the targets that you have set. This will vary for every business and organisation as each business will have a different philosophy or a different WHY? Some businesses want to be the best in terms of customer service and others may want to sell the highest amount of goods at the required profit margin to meet their targets.
Finally, I would recommend that you involve all team members in the strategy process to get an overall feel for how the business is performing and the direction in which it should go. And some of the best ideas may come from the most unlikely source!
If you would like to discuss preparing your business strategy or if you would like us to facilitate a strategy day please call UHY Haines Norton on 4972 1300 or email info@uhyhncq.com.au