Sarah Lakhani Consulting

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strategy success

Make Your Strategy Actionable

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When I worked in a corporate environment, there were two categories of people when it came to strategy – those that were eager to define their strategy, draw up a strategic plan and follow through on it, and those who saw strategy and strategic plans as a “paper exercise”.  The latter felt that working on strategy was a waste of time, mostly because it would take a significant amount of resources (people and time) to put together, and then not much would come out of it in the end.  It wouldn’t be an actionable strategy. People would go back to doing what they used to do, and at most there might be a couple of new things implemented.  But for the most part, nothing would really change.  

Now that I’ve started my own business and I get to work with entrepreneurs and small business owners, I see, well, the same!  And so I’ve been really interested in finding out why some strategy work just hasn’t made a positive impact on the people who requested it.  Here’s what I’ve found.  It’s really just ONE thing.  Your strategy has to be implementable. Otherwise, it really will be a waste of time and effort and won’t change anything in your business.  And, most importantly, after deciding on your strategy, you absolutely should put together a strategic plan that has an outcome that is actionable – something that you can pick up and easily start working towards implementing.  This is so key.  

So how, then, does something as “theoretical” (as one creative entrepreneur called it) as a strategy become something that you can see and touch and action?

The key is to break the strategic plan down into smaller and smaller items, until you have a strategic plan of bite-sized chunks.  But I’m getting ahead of myself here.  Let’s start at the top.

Step 1 – Decide on your strategy

If you haven’t read “What is Strategy”, do that first (it’ll open in a new tab) and then come back here.  The first thing you need to do is decide what makes you different, and use that as the anchor in crafting out your vision, mission and values, your long-term goals, how you’ll compete and who your competitors are, and of course, who your customers are.  Those are the basics.  

Step 2 – Group your strategy into pillars

Now that you know where you want to go, and you can explain who you are and why you’re different, you can start building some strategic pillars.  This is a typical list that you can apply across any business:

  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Products/Services
  • Financials
  • People
  • Operations

Under each of these pillars, begin writing down some action items – things you need to do to get to the goals you set out in Step 1.  

For example, let’s say you run a small Digital Marketing agency.  One of your goals might be to make $500,000 in revenue across all your products and services.  You currently offer two things – project-based digital marketing services and an online digital marketing course.  You split your revenue across the two and decide your targets will be 80% ($400,000) from project-based digital marketing services and 20% ($100,000) from the online digital marketing course.  

You decide to use the pillars suggested above (Sales, Marketing, Products/Services, Financials, People and Operations).  Under Sales, you set a few goals:

  1. 50% of project-based services to come from small/medium businesses 
  2. 50% of project-based services to come from large corporations 
  3. 75% of online digital marketing course to come from large corporations 

You’re doing well.  This is a great start.  You’ll do the same for all your pillars, breaking down each one into no more than 10-12 goals.  Now let’s move on to step 3.  

Step 3 – Break each goal within each pillar into bite-sized actions

This is the part that really makes a difference.  When working on your strategic plan, you need to get to, well, a plan!  I like to create pages for each of the pillars, and then break those pillars down into the goals, which I then break down into action items.  Let’s continue the example above to see what this would look like.

Using the first goal under Sales, “50% of project-based services to come from small/medium businesses”, you can break this down into industries, or even specific businesses you’d like to target.  Let’s do the latter.  When you make this list, bear in mind that not every one will end up generating revenue, so you’ve got to make a big enough list to hit your target.  

  • Organization: F&B Business #1
  • Organization: Health, Beauty & Fitness Business #2
  • Organization: Travel and Lodging Business #3
  • Organization: F&B Business #2
  • Organization: F&B Business #3

Now that you have an idea of exactly who you’d like to target to reach your goal for small/medium businesses, we’ll begin to break this down into actionable steps. Let’s do this for the first business on the list – “Organization: F&B Business #1”.

  1. Follow on instagram
  2. Comment & like posts at least 2x week
  3. Collate ideas of how F&B Business #1 can benefit from digital marketing services
  4. Reach out to Sarah who used to work at F&B Business #1 and ask if she can arrange an introduction
  5. Meet with representative of F&B Business #1 and demonstrate how you can help increase their sales at a low cost
  6. Follow up after the meeting

Your list can stop there for now, and you can add more action items if F&B Business #1 decides to sign you on.  

The idea is to have a strategic plan that is broken down into action items that are easy to do and do not cause overwhelm – because we’ve all been in a position where there’s so much to do that we just don’t know where to start.  This strategic plan makes it easy to know where you should be putting your effort and energy.

How your strategic plan positively impacts your strategy

You created your strategic plan by breaking down your strategy, so naturally you’d expect that the achievement of the action items in your strategic plan will lead to the achievement of your strategy – and you’re right, it should! A little caveat here that if all your leads turn you down, or you can’t get your product to work properly, etc., achievement of the strategy will be unlikely.  But assuming you have a good product/service and that the outcomes of the action items are (mostly) positive, you’ll be able to easily complete the goals within the pillars, which will then lead to achievement of the long-term strategy.  

Strategic Planning Action Time

If you haven’t spent time building your strategy and strategic plan, you should really consider taking some time out of your schedule, perhaps a couple of days, or a whole week, and working through it.  By doing this, you’ll make sure that you and your team spend your time on activities that contribute to your strategic objectives, and essentially, that you don’t waste your time on activities that won’t get you to where you want to go.  

What has your biggest challenge with creating an actionable strategy been? Have you had any great or bad experiences with this? Post your comments and any questions below, and if you can help anyone else out, don’t hesitate to do so! As always, if you’ve found this article useful, share it with someone who’ll benefit from it as well!

Giving Your Strategy its Best Chance for Success

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Every now and again – whether because of competitors and competition, an external disruption, an internal change, the new year, or a vast number of other factors – a business will have to adjust its strategy.  Undoubtedly, you’ve had to adjust strategy too, at some point over the course of your business.  The big question is – did it work?  Were you able to successfully implement your new business strategy?  If you’ve been through a few strategic changes, perhaps you’ve noticed that some have worked out better than others.  Why is that?  

Strategy is not Enough

The truth is, you need more than just a strategy.  You need to ensure that your organization is set up to be able to deliver against that strategy and to be able to achieve the objectives set out in the strategy.  So let’s break that down.  How do you assess and then, if needed, set your organization up to deliver against your new strategy?  

There are several aspects of the organization that you’ll need to look at.  I’ve broken them down below, and provided examples of what you should be looking for.  If you find that your organization is not set up in a manner that supports the strategy, start making changes to create that alignment and support.  Otherwise, there’s a good chance you’ll find a big gap between your expectations and the outcome.  

These are the most important elements of your organization that will provide the support needed to bring your strategy to life. 

#1 – Ensure the right people and skills are in place

Sometimes – actually a lot of the time – leaders tend to think that once a strategic plan has been put into place and communicated to the business, everyone will just start doing what they’re meant to be doing with the new strategy in mind.  But the truth is, sometimes that new strategy requires people with different (new!) skills, and sometimes even entire teams.  So before you build an expectation that your team will be able to achieve the strategic objectives you’ve set out, ask yourself:

  • What skills are needed for these objectives to be brought to life?
  • Does my team have these skills?
  • Do the people who have these skills also have the time to spend on the new activities, or is their time already taken up doing other activities that are also required?  

#2 – Provide flexible principles for your team to use when managing new situations or decisions

We all know that you can’t plan for every possible situation or decision that each person in your business will need to make at some point.  So instead of trying, it makes a lot more sense, both in terms of your time and in terms of your sanity, to create a set of principles that can guide people within your organization to make the right decisions.  For example, if your business is built on great customer service, then making that a clear principle helps frontline staff know to put great customer service above all else when talking with customers.  On the other hand, if low cost is what your business is built on, a frontline member of your team may have to make a different decision.  Bear in mind, you can’t have it all.  Know that there are trade-offs, embrace them, make them known to your team, and provide clear priorities for everyone to follow.  

#3 – Take stock of your culture and make changes as needed

Your culture has to support your strategy.  It’s an absolute necessity.  Think about the activities you’re asking your organization to undertake, and determine the values, behaviors and leadership styles that are necessary for them to be successfully implemented.  Are these in place right now, or is your organization currently set up in a completely different manner?  For example, if you need your team to be developing more ideas, then you’ll have to create a culture where experimentation (and failure!) is supported – not just passively, but also actively, for example: Do people have the time to create and test new things?  Or perhaps your new strategy requires people to work together, but your teams are still very silo’d, and don’t trust each other.  Be diligent and ensure that your culture and your strategy align.  Even the best strategy won’t amount to much with a culture that doesn’t align to it.  

#4 – Make sure the technology and data that is needed for success is available

It is extremely important to make sure that the resources, particularly the technology and data, that a person (or team) needs in order to effectively do their job is available to them.  Look through your strategic plan and make sure that you highlight activities that require different technology and data as compared to what is available today.  How can you obtain these?  In the absence of these, how can your team adjust their activities to still deliver value, albeit not the full value that your future state outlines? 

#5 – Re-engineer your processes and activities so they reinforce, support and complement the new strategy

Revisit your processes and activities.  These were designed with your old strategy in mind.  They supported what your team used to deliver, in ways that made the most of their skills in line with the old strategy.  Your old processes may have been perfectly fine for your previous strategy, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right way to do things for your new strategy.   Now that you have a new direction that you’d like the business to go in, you’ll need to make sure your processes and your teams’ activities support it.  Re-engineer old processes, end-to-end, to make sure that your teams’ time is spent on activities that deliver value, in the most efficient and effective way, for your new strategy. 

#6 – Measure the right indicators 

When you change your strategic priorities, you absolutely need to review the metrics you and your teams measure, and adjust them so that they continue to bring to light the important measures that you and your team will want to track your success against.  Make sure, too, that your metrics don’t clash with one another.  Asking a call center team to focus on delivering excellent customer service but then measuring them on reducing their call time isn’t going to produce great results.  Go through your metrics, team by team, and make sure they are designed to be supportive of your new strategy.  

#7 – Communicate the change at every level

Finally, communicate the change in strategy to the entire organization.  You might not need to communicate everything to everyone – it depends on your team size and functions – but it is critically important for everyone to know that a change is taking place, and how they contribute to it.  Everyone needs to know and be very clear on how their daily activities need to change in order for them to continue to be an active contributor to the business.  Understanding the key principles behind the new strategy also helps people at every level know whether what they are doing is helping or hindering the implementation of the new direction.  

Support your strategy with necessary changes

Don’t be scared to change your strategy.  Work through the areas outlined above and put the right resources and elements in place.  It may not have always gone to plan in the past, but you can give your strategy the best chance of success by setting it up with the support it needs to grow, live and thrive.  

Are you working on a new strategy?  Which of the elements above do you think could be the largest hurdle for your organization? Post your comments and any questions below, and if you can help anyone else, don’t hesitate to do so! As always, if you’ve found this article useful, share it with someone who’ll benefit from it as well!