Building Business

Self Taught MBA: Strategic Planning, Part 3 - Organizing a Strategic Planning Session

comments (0) May 7th, 2012 in Blogs

Fernando Pages Ruiz, contributor

"HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY" (Paperback: 156 pages Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing, LLC (November 10, 2008). Just because you are in a leadership position does not anoint you as an effective leader. Theodore V. (Ted) Gee Jr. a former executive at Pulte, with global experience in operational and strategic levels of leadership. His well received book (just look at Amazon comments) promises to provide the tools needed for planning and executing.

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At the beginning of each year, many organizations gather their key decision makers and hole them up for a day in what's called a board retreat. "A well-planned, inclusively conceived, effectively executed retreat is perhaps the best way to address head-on some of the more challenging issues facing a board and the organization," sums up the more formal approach, as described in Sandra R. Hughes' To Go Forward, Retreat: The Board Retreat Handbook. In essence, the retreat is time set aside to focus on the future, redefine the direction of your company, and commit to concrete actions. A luxury that organizations with a staff, management and high-level decision making board can well afford; but one even the smallest company can ill afford to ignore.

You don't have board, or stockholders to report to, and this can make it easy to ignore the formal aspects of strategic planning. I recommend you maintain a few of the formalities, principally, set time aside for planning, if not a whole day, then maybe ten hours or more scheduled into four sessions. Write down notes, and turn them into a clean set of objectives and tasks with milestones and a schedule. In that schedule, set dates to review progress and make any necessary adjustments to the plan. In this way, your beginning-of-the-year-planning retreat launches a year of continuous execution, appraisal and re-planning.

I found the following set of meetings, spread over several days, useful for yearly planning. The first meeting: with myself. I schedule two hours alone with pen and paper to graph what we have done the prior year and what we are doing now. I make room to comment on the benefits, challenges, opportunities and solutions to problems in this area.

Business Activity	Benefits	Challenges	Opportunities	Solutions
8 homes closed	Maintain company momentum	Slow sales, canceled contracts, limited financing.	Investors available for rental housing; fix and flip.	Focus on duplex, four-plex buildings with investors, sell to partnership and keep a percentage of ownership.
5 large remodeling projects.	Bulk of company profit.	Time-consuming customer service demands. Lack of remodeling management experience, lack of remodel-management systems in place.	Begin to establish company reputation in remodeling. Find compatible focus in remodeling: green, cheap, light commercial?	Leverage employees that have worked in remodeling companies prior; avail ourselves of NAHB remodeler education programs.

I finish by merging my challenges and opportunities and turn them into developing prospects, making another table, with similar notes, but under the headings, Outlook, Threat, Opportunity, and Comment, which are the formal strategic planning assessment categories.

Outlook	Threat	Opportunity	Comment
Slow new home market, lack of financing.	X		Our business has focused on new home construction for 20 years.
Rental market strong, difficult financing, but investor capital available and motivated.	X	X	This leverages our construction infrastructure, provides cash flow, but limited short-term profits.
Remodeling remains slow, but at least it has a pulse.		X	We can leverage name recognition in community and Energy Star affiliation to distinguish ourselves from established remodeling competition.