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.

Implementation is the phase that turns strategies and plans into actions in order to accomplish strategic objectives and goals. Implementing your strategic plan is as important as — or even more important than — your strategy. The critical actions move a strategic plan from a document that sits on the shelf to actions that drive business growth.

Implementing your strategic plan includes several different pieces. Executing a plan can sometimes feel like it needs another strategic plan of its own. Use the following set of comprehensive implementation steps as your base implementation plan. Modify these steps to make them your own timeline and fit your organization’s culture and structure.

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.