Strategic Planning

Every business needs to plan for its long-term future.

Creating and implementing a strategic plan will have a significant impact on your long-term success. It will establish a future vision of your company, set long-term goals and address how to fill the gap between what your business looks like today and your desired future.

A strategic plan will enable you to decide what you want your future to look like and proactively take the necessary steps to get there. The alternative – to wait and see – will eventually necessitate you to take a defensive position and respond to market forces like competition, new technology and regulatory reform that you weren’t prepared for.

The benefits of a strategic plan are many. A well implemented strategic plan will:

• Provide clear direction to employees and leadership
• Unify all staff with a shared vision and objectives
•  Enable better decision making
•  Enable effective allocation of resources
• Establish a competitive advantage
• Align and focus all areas of your business to achieve your vision and goals
• Enable you to track progress and take decisive action to get back on track if and as needed

In short, a well executed strategic plan is key to helping you achieve your business goals and grow shareholder value.

F&M Strategic Planning Process

Our Strategic Planning process is designed to answer the following questions:

• Where do we want to be?
• How will we know when we get there?
• Where are we now?
• How do we get there?
• What changes may take place in the external environment that we need to plan for?

F&M Strategic Planning process involves four steps:

1. Plan to Plan – an initial planning meeting to discuss your overall objectives, project timelines, deliverables, planning team members, stakeholders and their involvement, company background information, and data sources.As an option, your team may undertake a Learning Style Inventory (LSI) as a part of the Plan-to-Plan process. The LSI will help your planning team to understand how their learning style impacts problem solving, teamwork, managing conflict and communications. Understanding your team members LSI can be a valuable tool to enable the team to more effectively work together.
2. Organizational Assessment – our consultants will conduct an assessment of your organization in its current operating environment to provide critical information to the planning workshop that will follow. This will involve gathering, analyzing and synthesising information from financial reports, business plans, other reports and the results of employee interviews. A key part of this analysis will be looking at a previous strategic planning and corporate guiding documents such as Mission and Vision Statements; these statements will be compared to the current operations of the company.
3. Planning Workshop – our skilled consultants will facilitate a collaborative and consensus based process with your team to define and articulate your future vision, core ideology, strategic objectives and goals. Once these are agreed upon your team will develop a set of objective based strategies that define the competitive efforts and business approaches that need to be employed. Finally, we will look at what operation aspects of the business can modified, such as standard operating procedures or strategic hiring, to achieve these goals.
4. Implementation, Performance Monitoring and Managing Change – Strategic Planning is all about change, and statistics show that a large percentage of change initiatives fail. Once your plan is created, we move into to the role of coach and facilitator to help you implement the objective-based strategies, and champion the changes in your organization necessary to achieve your goals.Performance monitoring is a key part of this step. F&M uses the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a framework to develop a Performance Management System to implement and track your plan. The BSC is a widely used and effective tool that looks at performance from four equally important perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and human and intellectual capital.

Annual Planning Made Simple

Once your Strategic Plan and Balanced Scorecard are in place, your annual business planning cycle is simply a once yearly step in your performance management system to update the plan and allocate resources to achieve targets.