Imagine driving a car without a steering wheel. That's exactly what it would be like to run your business without a good strategic plan. A strategic plan is essential to chart your company's future growth and profitability. The process examines the company's strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities and current business climate. The resulting plan establishes the mission, vision and values that guide your company. Business strategies are examined with an eye toward increased growth.Joe Kinsella, president of Pointe Precision, a Stevens Point, Wis., contract machining company, is a firm believer in strategic planning. That's because he has seen the company's investment in strategic planning pay big dividends: market share up 10 percent, turnover down from 22 percent to six, and new customer accounts up 19 percent.
The experts at CMC use a variety of powerful tools to help you uncover new opportunities.
- Strategic competencies identify strengths with market potential.
- The competitive analysis discovers insights about competitors.
- The MVC/Customer Analysis profiles your most profitable customers.
- Market segmentation
- The Innovation Blitz identifies opportunities internally through cross-functional teams.
- Mentoring and coaching to help build a "culture of Innovation."
- The Market Intelligence Roundtable draws information from customers, suppliers and others to help you gain insight about your business.
Strategic competencies are more than just what you are good at. Strategic competencies have market potential. They reveal solutions. They help you expand the focus of your business from products-only to solution providers for your customers.
Four simple questions can help you identify your strategic competencies:
First ask what you are good at. These are your company's strengths.
The remaining three questions will fine tune your strategic competencies.
- Which strengths are valuable to your customers? If so, they generate marketable products.
- Do they differentiate you from the competition? If so, they can help defend your products against becoming commodities.
- Are they difficult to copy? If so, they create barriers to entry.
Innovation Blitz
The Innovation Blitz-a key element of strategic repositioning-helps companies discard their limitations and discover new opportunities for serving new and old customers. According to Joel Barker, creator of the best-selling video series "Discovering the Future" when you ask yourself what is "… impossible to do in your business today, but, if could be done, would fundamentally change it for the better", you open up a universe of opportunity.
It begins with an Innovation Blitz team of 12 to 15 people from inside and outside your company. Pick outsiders for the team from non-competing firms, customers, vendors, or creative disciplines to bring a mix of thinking and experience to the process. The team then identifies the company's strategic competencies. I Use this free matrix assessment to help you.
A full day of innovative thinking begins with a tour of your plant, which gives outsiders an opportunity to form a more accurate picture of the strategic competencies of the organization. It also lets the insiders look at the company from a fresh perspective instead of their own narrower area of expertise.
Next, the team does innovative thinking prep work. The members discuss the concept of change to help them understand the ramifications about pre-conceived notion on how the company and the business world work. The prep work also helps to reinforce and stimulate creativity, which is essential to a successful blitz.
Most of the day is spent generating creative ideas that answer one question: "What products, services, or value-added services could we deliver with these competencies that we're not already delivering?" Sometimes it is those "far-fetched" or "wacky" ideas that hold the key to new markets or customers that at one time you would not have considered. Lastly, identify, prioritize and develop an action plan to implement the best ideas.
