Strategic Planning | Teik Oh

Never mind the width, feel the quality!

Mar 02 2015

I hope that you are keeping an eye on your business performance. However, even if you are, you may be overlooking several critical factors about how your business is performing, and some of these could be the difference between success and failure.

Most business owners probably keep a good eye over quantitative measurements such as sales, average markup, salary costs and expenses. However some of the most useful measures can be qualitative rather than quantitative, for example staff and client turnover rates or average service-delivery times.

Overall, before you start measuring your business performance, you need to be very clear what “success” means to you so that you can measure and benchmark the measurements that really count toward that success. If you are not clear on what success means in your business, you may be measuring the wrong measurements. For example if you focus on profit, you may actually be driving away customer volumes if your success is based on low margin/high volume.

Having determined what success means to you, you can then choose the metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, that drive that success. As you choose them, always ask yourself: “If I improve this measure, will that improvement lead to success?”

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How to Prepare a USEFUL Strategic Plan

Jan 19 2015

Does this sound familiar?:-

It is about 5 years since your company did its last strategic plan, and you, or your Board have been reminded that it is good governance to renew it. You can’t actually see a reason to do it in practical terms – the economy has been what it is and the business has been doing what it can. After all, was your last prediction of the future any good?

Nevertheless you decide to do it. You hire a facilitator and ask for a quote. When the facilitator (if they are worth the money) asks for preparation time that may include research into your industry and company, along with interviews with stakeholders, and prices her quote accordingly. You receive the quote and negotiate it downwards, removing these “extraneous” tasks and leaving the task of facilitating a day’s workshop and writing it up.

You organise a day’s retreat for the Board and senior staff. You hold the meeting, everyone has a good time away from the office, you all contribute to discussion and feel satisfied that you have thrashed the issues. The facilitator writes up the plan, you review it and “implement” it.

In a few months, the exercise is forgotten.

Familiar?
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Happy New Year! Now make a plan!

Dec 29 2014

It’s the start of a new year soon, so to all my readers old and new – Happy New Year!

And in the new year, after we have all recovered from those annual excesses that we always say we will avoid, we will come to the realisation that we really ought to do some planning and goal-setting for the year ahead.

Ultimately the secret of your success is to make your business grow year by year.

It is an old adage: “businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan”. Time and time again surveys show that fewer than 3% to 7% of small and medium businesses that fail have ever done any business planning.

The start of a new year is the best time to start a business plan. You can “close the books” and think about new initiatives and ideas about your business. It is the business equivalent of making your New Year resolutions, but with a better process that can lead to follow-through and organized action.
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How to Implement Strategy

Dec 23 2014

Most organisations will have a strategic plan. Even if it is not a formal document, the organisation will have created a set of strategies over time, perhaps in the development of business plans, or to develop a new initiative, open a new branch or market, or even to develop internal skills and capacities.

However many of these strategies are simply not carried out to fruition. Strategic Plans, business plans or sets of well thought out strategies sit on the shelf with limited or minimal implementation. Often, this is because organisations don’t work on implementing strategies day to day. Organisations may be good at what they do on a day to day basis, such as buying, producing and selling, but these processes are conducted by functional areas who have functional responsibility for those areas. Implementation of strategies on the other hand are often cross-functional, interrupt existing responsibilities and processes, and inadequately resourced.

So, having spent scarce time and energy creating well thought out and well crafted strategies, what can you do to ensure that you are able to execute strategy effectively?
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Four Steps To Simplify Your Message

Nov 19 2014

Do you want to explain difficult facts to clients? Do you want to get a sales message across?

The first few seconds of any interaction is critical, whether you know the other person or not.

This is particularly important in any business interaction today where people’s time seem so limited, people seem so aware of “that sales pitch” coming and are ready to tune off. Today’s SMS and social media world seem to do nothing but ready for us to listen to tweets.

If you want to put your business message across, whether it is advice, technical information or a sales pitch you need to tune yourself and your communication to that frequency which is most clear.

I have found that the best way to do this is to use four simple steps in any business communication.
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Category - Strategic Planning

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Never mind the width, feel the quality!

How to Prepare a USEFUL Strategic Plan

Happy New Year! Now make a plan!

How to Implement Strategy

Four Steps To Simplify Your Message