Get ‘Er Done

It happens all the time. You attend a seminar and hear the speaker say, “You need a good business strategy if you’re going to be successful.” You leave the event fired up and ready to craft the strategic plan that will drive success. But then the day-to-day realities of running a company, a division, a department, or a sales territory take over and get in the way.

Besides the major distraction caused by doing your job, many managers find themselves stuck at the first step of the strategic planning process: “What am I trying to accomplish?”

Erika Andersen’s book Being Strategic provides a simple, step-by-step model to push through the daily distractions and design a plan built to ensure you get where you should go instead of trying to find some good, after the fact, of getting where you went.

Here are some great questions to ask yourself:

Is your business growth less than desirable? What are your options to accelerate growth?
Are your manufacturing costs too high? How can they be streamlined?
Are you losing business to competitors? What are they offering that your business doesn’t?
The best questions though might just be: How and why do people use what I am selling today and how and why will they do it in the future?