Helping Great Leaders Accomplish Even More

Working with Janet is one of the top business decisions I’ve made as CEO of Red Level. Janet is a gifted leader, facilitator and professional consultant with a passion to see each of our executives reach their maximum potential. She has an innate ability to encourage and drive executives—asking challenging questions and expecting them to ponder, debate, and respond. She effectively holds executives accountable to their commitments and helps them develop strategic solutions to ensure success. I’d highly recommend her to any company seeking a robust process for developing and executing corporate strategy.”

Like following a great recipe makes for a great meal, having a great strategic plan provides you and your team with a clear path to accomplishing key business goals. Strategic planning sets an organization on a path toward certain financial results.  Traditional financial planning often focuses on the numbers as “the strategic plan,” rather than the numbers being the plan’s supportive framework. A good organizational strategic plan brings multiple facets into plan development and includes the entire company in the process. The first step is to develop the vision for the company. Where do you want to take this company (or department) in the next three to five years?  Once we’ve identified (or re-evaluated) the company vision, mission and values, we’re ready to begin creating your customized implementation plan.

A great strategic plan examines critical areas of the business. The list below captures just a few of them. Your strategic plan should also include a balanced scorecard in order to measure progress towards stated goals over a specific period of time and keep the team accountable.

• • FINANCIAL
    Revenue, expense, profit margin, goals
  • CUSTOMER
    Satisfaction, acquisition, retention
  • INTERNAL PROCESSES & OPERATIONS
    Efficiency of internal systems, technological infrastructure, product development
  • MARKETING AND SALES 
    Competitive analysis, company/product narrative, return on investment, product pricing
  • PEOPLE
    Human capital development, internal culture goals, and more

True Depth’s approach to strategic planning is flexible. It’s based on the culture of your organization and its leadership, the objectives for the process as established by leadership, and the planning experience level of the team(s). Of course, we can always be available for tune-ups and check-ins, but our goal is to leave you with a plan that can be executed by your team. We believe that long-term growth is best established when it is integrated into the structure of the organization, rather than coming from outside consultants.

Why Build a Strategic Plan?

What does your organization need to thrive in the next three to five years? Will your current vision and mission take you there? McKinsey research shows that a formal strategic planning processes plays an important role in improving overall satisfaction with strategy development. This can be seen in the responses of the 79 percent of managers who claimed that the formal planning process played a significant role in developing strategies and who were satisfied with the approach of their companies, compared with only 21 percent of respondents who felt that the process did not play a significant role. Looked at another way, 51 percent of the respondents whose companies had no formal process were dissatisfied with their approach to the development of strategy, versus only 20 percent of those at companies with a formal process.