Strategic Planning for Small Businesses

[The venue will expect us to buy food. Come prepared to eat at least a little something.]

Participants are led through a series of exercises that help define the boundaries of effective strategic planning, and help participants find the thin line between "good" planning and over-planning.

Participants will:

• Learn how to create an effective one-page strategic plan in one day
• Learn how to quickly pick winning strategic options
• Learn how to avoid the pitfalls of over-planning

The Workshop provides an overview of a full Strategic Planning Session:

Strategic Planning Session

By the end of a full Strategic Planning session we would have these deliverables:

1. A list of our many possible directions
2. A list of the variables affecting us
3. An Assessment of our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
4. A framework for weighing and judging our options (a Strategic Option Selection Process) that identifies which things we will do, which things we will not do, and why.
5. We then use that framework to help us make some decisions about the long term (1-3 year) course
6. Based on those decisions, come up with an Action Plan for the coming 3-6 months
7. If time allows, create a rough draft Operating Plan (for later refinement) with deadlines, assignments, and budgets

The benefit of these deliverables are:

• You will have a clear, definite, specific direction
• You will know why that is your direction
• You will be able to plug new data and new variables into the framework, and make course corrections easily, in the weeks and months to come
• You can commit resources -- and possibly raise funds from others -- based on a solid, defensible plan that in turn is based on a transparent process and documented assumptions

And the communications benefits are enormous. With both a Strategic Plan and a team that has worked together to create that plan, you will be able to easily and quickly keep staff, volunteers, stakeholders, and the public (as well as HQ) in the loop, and your ability to respond to emergent events will increase. You also reduce the damage that reactivity can have on your long term projects and investments.