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.

So just when should you hire an outside facilitator for your strategic planning process? In an age of consultants, organizational leaders, and planners for everything under the sun, hiring a helper doesn’t come cheap. The costs to your company for strategic planning include the following: The value of your participants’ time — more precious than ever in this time-starved world The cost of any facility rental, AV equipment, travel, food, and lodging The opportunity cost if, following your meeting, plans and decisions aren’t carried out or your team’s behavior doesn’t change for the better Add up these actual and figural costs, and you can easily see how strategic planning represents a real investment.

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.

Quite often, people confuse strategy and tactics and think the two terms are interchangeable in strategic planning, but they’re not. According to strategy guru Michael Porter, “Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

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.

Strategic planning can create a ton of questions. If you already have a long list of questions, you’re not alone. Here are some answers to the most commonly asked questions. Who uses strategic plans? Everyone uses strategic plans — or at least every company and organization that wants to be successful. Companies in every industry, in every part of the world, and in most of the Fortune 500 use strategic plans.