Establish your Mission, Vision and Values These three things are what will inform everything you do with your business going forward. Defining your mission is about what you do in terms of your product or service and what you need to do now in order to best provide this product or service. Your vision is where you want to be in a few years: what need you want to fulfil and what you want your organisation to be perceived as. This statement does not need specific goals, just a broad goal to work towards from which you can adapt your mission statement. These two statements need to support each other to provide a strong and coherent message to both stakeholders and employees. For example, Google’s Mission statement is ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, while their Vision statement is ‘to provide access to the world’s information in one click’. These two statements provide both the process and goal for their business. Finally, a Values statement is about describing how you do business. For example, terms like efficiency, customer-focus and environmentally minded are excellent starting points for value statements. These only need to be short statements, but enough to remind of what you want to achieve, what that will look like once you get there and what principles will inform your decisions along the way.
Market analysis
Now you know what you want to achieve, you need to start thinking about how to get there in real terms. Begin analysing your direct competitors and other major players in your market and see what they’re doing that works. More importantly, try to find the gaps in the market to which your business can stake a claim. What is nobody else offering that you can? What else makes you unique? Leverage both of these as you continue to develop your operational capacity moving forward.
Financials
You’ve established what makes your business unique and how to disrupt your market, but now its time to talk to numbers. What resources are you going to require in terms of employees, office space, IT equipment, etc.? This is one of the hardest but most important parts of the process and is ultimately why the majority of business fail. It is important that you have capable and professional people dealing with your finances and who can help you create a sustainable business going forward. It may be worth outsourcing this to ensure its proper completion, check out minc’s services here.
Strategic plan
Now you’ve dealt with the broad strokes, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. You need to start to design steps towards your goals and how you’re going to utilise your employees and other resources. Consult with your managers and directors to create steps that suit the strengths of each team and provide clear, manageable tasks for your employees. Be sure to outline your long-term goals to them as well in order to provide a sense of progress and a clear deal to be working towards.
Metrics
You’ll know success when you reach it, but you need ways to of measuring whether you’re on the right track. Consider your Mission, Vision and Values and identify quantifiable ways to measure your progress as you head towards achieving your strategic goals. Furthermore, if you can figure out ways of quantifying if your values are being upheld, then that’s a fantastic way of designing incentives and rewards for employees.