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.

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.

I don’t try to come to conclusions, or make decisions on this first-draft of a planning document, but simply to focus my thoughts more deeply than I can while managing day-to-day activities, outlining subjects for further conversation.

Next, I meet with my management level employees. This could be you and your spouse, or you and your lead carpenter and bookkeeper. This is another two-hour session that actually works best if you have three to five people involved. You might start the session going over what the company did last year, what worked and didn’t (table one), and then move onto your analysis of the outlook, evolving trends in the local economy, competition, and your initial take on the threats and opportunities these trends portend.  Open the discussion by asking, “How each of you see the outlook, our opportunities and threats?” And then listen, taking notes and asking questions. You’ll be surprised by what you learn through listening to different perspectives.  

These are the two main meetings, a one-on-one with yourself, and then a summit with your key associates. I like to end this second meeting by scheduling a follow-up with the same group, sometimes with assigned tasks to report on, such market research or questions to ask suppliers, bankers, and realtors. Between the first and follow-up second summit meetings, I find it useful to make a few lunch appointments with individuals I trust, including suppliers and sometimes even a competitor. I state the outlook focusing on the threats and ask questions about what others are doing. I listen for opportunities, and if I find certain ideas resonate, I may invite participation to begin building momentum.

Even if much of what comes out of these meetings mirrors what you already conjured up on your own, inviting others to join you in asking and answering the questions helps to build commitment and ownership of new initiatives and renewed direction. One of the most useful gatherings in this respect was what I dubbed the “subcontractor round table,” a lunch invitation to major subs where we discussed what was working in the market, what others were doing, and what we could all do as a team to keep putting bread and butter on the table.

The last step and the subject of the next blog: turn all this into a set of goals, and tasks with a calendar of actions and assessments.    

 What’s working today?

We could start this year’s strategic planning session right now, by asking readers – you – to chime in, and describe the present outlook, opportunities and challenges.

For what it’s worth, I will share some insight obtained as a construction journalist, who spends several hours a week speaking with homebuilders, architects, planners and remodelers throughout the US. The builders I speak to regularly that enjoy stable or growing businesses in this economy include extreme, green builders engaged in bushwhacking best practices; replacement contractors (siding, windows and roofs); small-job-focused remodeling companies (Three Day Kitchens & Baths, for example, and handyman services); and insurance repair contractors (those that refurbish water/fire-damaged structures). On the development front, those few succeeding today are either focused on extremely energy-efficient housing (boutique green developers), or building high density, mixed use and mixed income urban infill projects, especially walkable communities and transit-oriented development. A few, very well organized and financed companies succeed in scattered site, single family home infill.

I offer this list, which may not be exhaustive, as my experience with residential building opportunities that make sense today. If you have others, please add your comments, you may be helping someone craft a new direction. Rather than an optional exercise, it may be more critical than ever to have a strategic plan of how you will deal with this tough economy.

Read more articles from the Building Business blog.

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