How to create your business strategy. Your business strategy is the big picture view of how you want your business to operate, and defines what your business needs to do to reach its long term goals. Your strategy will help guide the decision-making process of all the businesses operations including how you produce, distribute, market, sell and recruit.

I asked Dr Max McKeown that question and got the following answer

“A strategist should have an opinion about where the organisation is now (and where it’s come from). You should be asking: Where do we want to go next? And keep these questions in mind when asking about the changes that need to be made, how they should be made and how you can measure progress.”

Your strategy will make up part of the business plan and depending on the size of your business, and reason for writing a business plan you may not need much more than a 2 page plan which includes your strategy within it. We like the 6W plan.

There’s never a bad time to get clear on your strategy, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a one man band or the CEO. Too many business owners end up disliking their business because the “Management / leadership element” is just too damned tough. Setting out the sort of business that you want to become &  the direction of travel / rules of the game that you’ll abide by early is key. These things will make sure that you attract the right sort of people to your business, rather than just having to make do with whomever applies. It will also ensure that they look after your customers the way you want and expect.  Start with the end in mind guys!

A good business strategy will usually take the form of a written document(s) that focuses on the big picture and keeps the end in mind. It will clearly state what the primary business goals are, and provides you with a roadmap, that consists of a set of guiding values, promises and rules that define the way that you and your people behave, focus on and act.

Dr Max Mckeown is a very clever man who we’ve been following for some time. He wrote a very good book “The Strategy Book” which includes lots of different business models. We like his instant strategy model which you can download below with his kind permission.

At a basic level the strategy model poses 5 questions

1. 1. Where am I now
   2. What holds me back
   3. Where do I want to get to
   4. How do we do it
   5. How will we measure progress

DOWNLOAD YOUR INSTANT STRATEGY WORKSHEET

Simple and effective. Try it, and buy the book