How to make your business more Strategic

If you are a business owner, CEO, C-level exec or manager, you’re likely to hear something about strategic planning versus tactical planning on an almost daily basis.  Both are important, yet many business owners and founders tend to focus on the tactical, forgetting all about strategy – and thus, losing out on long term success.  What is the difference between strategy and tactics?

Strategic planning is macro-oriented with an emphasis on the big picture and your long term goals and objectives, in approximately 3 to 5 year increments.  This type of planning guides the fundamental decisions and actions that will shape the long term direction of a business’ development.   It focuses on the core of Who (you are) What (you want to accomplish) and Why (you want to accomplish the what).

Strategic planning includes areas like your (i) business’ market share; (ii) professional career path; (iii) life and/or business vision; (iv) investment goals; (v) personal and/or professional opportunity costs; (vi) mission; and (v) the allocation of resources.

Tactical planning is micro-oriented and focuses on your short term S.M.A.R.T. goals, which usually have 1 to 18 month time frames.  SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant & time specific.   Tactical planning is all about the How (i.e., process) of getting things going.  The focus is on operations including the creation and execution of effective, efficient action plans.

Areas covered in tactical planning include (i) monthly or quarterly sales goals; (ii) improving customer service in specific areas, (iii) reducing the number of your outside commitments so that you can simplify your life and (iv) creating action plans for your strategic (big picture) objectives.

Achieving accelerated success is all about first having a clear vision and mission (requires strategic planning) and then creating effective and efficient action plans to put the vision and mission in motion (requires tactical planning). If you don’t first have a clear vision and mission, your tactical plans will likely fail.

Please come back next week to read Part Two of this blog which will go deeper in depth about these two concepts. We will also discuss ideas on how you can get a clear view on how to achieve your successes, how you can get better at strategic thinking and how innovation is changing the ways in which businesses operate.

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About the author: David Brode is the Principal of the Brode Group. An economist by training, Brode has over two decades of experience helping ventures develop and communicate business strategies through financial models so they can launch, grow, and sell businesses.  Brode’s financial forecasting models have been through due diligence dozens of times and have been successful in securing over $11 billion in financing for projects worldwide.  Brode has a B.A. degree in Economics from the University of Michigan.