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 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.

The difference between strategic planning and strategic management can be profound to an organization when understood. Strategic planning usually refers to the development of a plan. Strategic management refers to both strategy development and execution. Strategic management is a business process. Strategic planning is an event.

When selecting a professional to guide your strategic planning session, be selective. Facilitation is different from public speaking or training. It’s not about having solid content, good platform skills, or an understanding of adult learning principles. Instead, facilitation involves working with groups of people in the moment.

At the end of the day, what is strategic planning all about? Growth. Businesses strive to grow more customers, more sales, positive cash flow, larger deal sizes, higher volume, more billable hours, justification for higher prices, and so on. Ask any hardworking entrepreneur what he or she is working on and you’re bound to hear a comment related to growth.

Rolling out your plan can range anywhere from a big, high-profile campaign to a low-key announcement. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to inform everyone in your organization. You may choose to give complete copies of the plan, including background material in appendixes, to certain groups of stakeholders, whereas you may give other groups only the body of the plan without its appendixes.

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.