Strategic Planning Services
Suppose you want to teach a class at a local university. Teaching a class requires a lot of planning similar to what is done in strategic planning. Let’s list what has to be done. First, you have to figure out at what level do you want to teach the class (do you want to challenge the students and at what level do you want to challenge them). Second, you have to decide whether to use a textbook, or to use all outside readings. Even if you use a textbook, it is very difficult to find a textbook that covers everything you want to cover and the way in which you want to treat it and that means finding supplemental readings and textbooks. If you are teaching at the undergraduate level, a lot of people are capable of teaching the course you are teaching (your competition) and so you may want to differentiate your course by adding topics and material that only you can teach.
Now start to make out a preliminary syllabus; the syllabus is the strategic plan for the course. The preliminary syllabus contains the course title, the textbook and other readings, then the outline for the course (the outline provides a list of topics, and the dates on which they will be covered) and the readings that will be assigned for that date. Next, learning is experiential, and so you will have to create a number of homework assignments to give the students. Since experience is about doing things repetitively you have to create homework assignments that get the students to perform the repetition. Now you adjust the syllabus to add the assignments and how you are going to grade them and the weight that will be used to calculate their grade. What about exams and what weight in the grade will they carry? Now your syllabus is completed and is a strategic plan. This plan for the class provides a road map for the class for both you and the students. The syllabus is so important as a strategic plan that most colleges and universities consider the syllabus to be a contract between the professor and the students.
For a business firm a strategic plan presents a road map that provides a way through to get the business from where they are now to where the business wants to be. This includes a way to negotiate the competitive landscape. Every business has a number of competitors and the number of competitors depends upon the markets and market segments the firm will serve. What products and services will you use to serve customers in those markets and market segments and how are they different from the competition? How will you price your product and service offering? How will you communicate to customers about your product offering? How will you allocate your marketing expenditures across the different communication media. What will it cost the firm to provide your product and service offering. How much will you spend on marketing? The strategic choices you make will influence the profits earned by the firm. But, the structure of the markets and market segments you want to serve really controls the profits earned by the firm and so the most important strategic choice the firm will make is to choose the markets and market segments the firm wants to serve. As part of our forecasting service, we offer a market planning service that will help you to understand the strategic choices that will shape the competitive landscape, once the choice of market has been made.
Please download our fact sheet to see what we do and what we will deliver to our clients in terms of budget planning.
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