8 Tips for Year-End Strategic Planning

Deciding where to invest business resources (e.g. time, employee labor, money, etc.) will determine the business’ path going forward. This kind of strategic thinking requires insight, information, perspective, and planning. Read on to discover industry-tested tips on how to end the year strong and start off the next year with a bang.

1. Work Backwards

   Step back to inspect where a business is going (e.g. X new locations opened or $X million in sales in 5 years, etc.). Ask where the business should be in the interim period. Where would the business need to be in 3 or 4 years to hit that 5-year goal?

2. Revisit Goals

   To determine where a business stands regarding those intervals and end goals, a business needs to understand where it was and if it moved at all. Do this by examining the goals set out for the current year to gauge progress, looking over the business’ body of work to spot positive growth, negative trends, and any stagnation. Make two lists, one to celebrate what was done and the other to prepare for what wasn’t.

3. Celebrate the Wins

   No business can survive if it doesn’t advertise its wins, both internally and externally, from a specific time period. This builds investor excitement, attracts new business, and gives a business a way to celebrate its employees. This kind of positive feedback will motivate your workforce going forward, as they are the primary contributing factor to a business’ success or failure.

4. Limiters and Solutions

   Next, examine the list of things that weren’t done. Look for limiting factors that jump out, reoccurring items, or topics that prevented goal accomplishment. Write all of these down in one list. Brainstorm with the team some quick solutions to each of these factors and write these in a separate list. It doesn’t need to be complicated; if a limiting factor is “lack of workforce skill-set,” then the solution will be “train workforce to fill gap.” Note that the end goal is what the workforce will do once trained. Their status as trained merely removes the limiting factor, enabling them to accomplish the goal.

5. Prioritization

   

   After you list limiting factors and their solutions, review the latter carefully. Identify solutions in terms of difficulty, then sort them starting with the most difficult and working down. Highlighting where the most work will be needed allows for strategic planning of resources and timelines, reducing unrealistic expectations.Next, look at the same list of solutions and mark them according to likelihood of success, with the most likely at the top on a new list.

6. Sweet Spots

   Once the two lists of solutions, in order of difficulty and chance of success, are done, examine each to find confluences of low difficulty and high success rate. These confluence points will give the business the best choices in terms of high success rate combined with ease of accomplishment. Mark these as “sweet spot” solutions, those that once done constitute a “grand-slam” for a business.

7. Brainstorm

   Have the team work out new ideas or retool old ones for use in the new year to help the business knock the “grand-slam” solutions out of the proverbial stadium. Bring in new people to have fresh eyes and minds looking at the problem-set. Examine other businesses in the same industry for lessons-learned or best-practices that might work in this context.

8. Assign Roles

   No plan will work if roles are not assigned. The final step in strategic planning is assigning work or goals to specific teams or individuals. Examine who the talent pool is that the business can access to make sure the necessary skill-sets already exist inside the business. If not, determine what is missing and get it. Determine what can be managed at a team-level versus what requires management oversight. Make sure success at each step is clearly defined and attainable, giving a business the best chance at a win.

Strategic planning sets a business up for the best possible future it can achieve. Follow these tips to give your business the plan it needs to make the next year its most successful ever.