Why You Need a Good Strategic Planning Process
Your strategic plan is not a strategic plan
Let's face it: you don’t have a strategic plan. You might not have taken the time, feel you lack the skills, or think it’s purely academic. You may have gone through the mission/vision/values exercise and set KPIs for the team. Great! But you still don’t have a strategic plan.
Strategy has a bad reputation. It’s seen as overly intellectual, conceptual, and not applicable to your business. It’s perceived as McKinsey’s domain—absurdly expensive and not actionable. Sound familiar? The truth is, without strategy, you’re missing out on a powerful leadership tool.
So what is strategy? Simply put, it’s defining the big problems you need to solve this quarter or this year to meet your goals. It’s not a grand plan for the distant future or an aspirational dream. It’s a pragmatic plan to get you from point A to point B.
Embrace your most powerful leadership tool
How do you build a strategic plan? Start with your strategic goals. In 99% of cases, this is a revenue / EBITDA number your investors want you to hit. Your strategic plan breaks down the initiatives needed to reach that goal, detailing the results expected and the resources required. Importantly, it also delineates what you will and will not do.
Your strategic plan isn’t a one-time task. It’s an iterative process involving your entire leadership team. Building it takes necessary cycles to deliver one of its most valuable outcomes: an organization where everyone buys into the ambition, effort, collaboration, and resources needed to succeed. It’s also a communication tool with your Board, setting expectations and providing a factual basis to push back on some goals.
The 7 benefits of having a strategic plan:
Set Clear Direction and Focus: Strategic planning provides a roadmap, aligning your team with a vision and long-term goals.
Optimize Resource Allocation: By identifying key priorities, you can allocate your scarce resources to the highest leverage activities and investments, maximizing your potential for success.
Establish a Clear Point of View: you have developed a clear perspective on what matters most, now you can confidently say no to distractions and low-impact activities.
Drive Alignment: one team one goal! The team has co-created the plan, now everyone can march towards achieving it.
Establish Clear Ownership: with this plan you can now divide and conquer. Clear lines of responsibility are now obvious, so are dependencies across teams.
Measure Progress and Create Accountability: you know where you are going but it won’t happen overnight. You can now set metrics and milestones to track progress and drive accountability across and within teams, ensuring everyone stays on course.
Become More Agile and Adaptable: Everyone loves it when a plan comes together. Chances are it won’t. Use actual data against your metrics and milestones to adjust plans, initiatives, and resource allocation, and communicate with your Board
Now is the time to build your strategic plan! Give yourself and your team clear directions to make H2 successful and set 2025 up for greatness.
Not sure how to start? Contact us, we are here to help.
Ari & Frederic
Why Choose Facta Partners?
The Facta team has been servicing growth for over two decades. We will help you define what growth means to you, set the strategic direction to approach it, allocate resources to support it, design processes to deliver it and make sure your team and board are excited about it. We don’t stop at crafting the plan, we also help you to deliver, in the trenches.
Why Facta? Because we have done it, from Series A startups to Fortune 100 enterprises across industries. We have been operators, with people to lead, departments to align and boards to please. We know what works, what doesn't, why and have distilled those lessons into a methodology with a clear point of view.
We are your throughline to what’s next.
