Erica Olsen

A strategic plan is essential for a successful business, and creating a strategic plan that you can actually use is key. Your plan should include certain elements, like mission, values, and vision statements. It should also avoid common pitfalls, like neglecting the specific needs of your organization, so it becomes your road map for success.

In strategic planning, benchmarks are surveys and assessments that help determine how well your company performs compared to other companies in your industry or business size. Following are just a handful of benchmarking tools available: BizStats: Visit the BizStats website for instant access to useful financial ratios, business statistics, and benchmarks.

Strategic planning is all about making choices. And strategic choice is about making subjective decisions based on goal information. To do so, you first generate a list of all feasible alternatives. You’ve more than likely developed a SWOT analysis that’s multiple pages in length. Now you need to narrow your focus to create a short list of strategic alternatives.

The purpose of a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is to help produce a good fit between your company’s resources and capabilities and your external environment. Your SWOT analysis is a balance sheet of your strategic position right now. In the analysis, you bring together all your internal factors, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as your external factors, opportunities, and threats.

Now that your strategic plan is all together in one place, you should take a step back and evaluate. Did you create the strategy you intended to create? More than likely, you and your team have put a lot of time into the document you now have in front of you. The first step after you’ve assembled your strategic plan is put it away for a week and don’t look at it.

Strategic plans can come in many different shapes and sizes, but they all have the following components. The list below describes each piece of a strategic plan in the order that they’re typically developed. Mission statement: The mission statement is an overarching, timeless expression of your purpose and aspiration, addressing both what you seek to accomplish and the manner in which the organization seeks to accomplish it.

Before you get too far into your strategic planning process, check out the following tips — your quick guide to getting the most out of your strategic planning process: Pull together a diverse, yet appropriate group of people to make up your planning team. Diversity leads to a better strategy. Bring together a small core team — between six and ten people — of leaders and managers who represent every area of the company.

Strategic planning can yield less than desirable results if you end up in one of the possible planning pitfalls. To prevent that from happening, here’s a list of the most common traps to avoid: Not having a burning platform: Fundamentally, organizations don’t have to have a strategic plan. Really, they don’t. Yes, you’ll run a better operation and, yes, a strategic plan is an outstanding management tool.

Strategic planning has a basic overall framework. Not to oversimplify the strategic planning process, but by placing all the parts of a plan into the following three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces of your plan fit together: Where are we now? Review your current strategic position and clarify your mission, vision, and values.