Communicate and monitor your plan
Strategic plans can get complex and will help guide your company for a long time. It is very important that the CEO be out in front communicating the direction of the company and how that plan is coming along.
“A strategic plan can be kind of complicated, because it touches all of the company and it goes out for an extended period of time,” Ouellette says. “The thing that we did was boil it down into a very concise statement. Ours is called ‘Focus on five.’ The five means the five letters in focus and each of those letters means something. The F stands for ‘first to market.’ The O stands for ‘optimizing sales.’ The C is ‘channel expansion.’ The U stands for ‘us or the employees’ and the S stands for ‘systems and processes.’ Every month, we have an event where we pull the company together and we call it a ‘Focus on five’ meeting. The first thing we do is to have one of the sponsors of each of those initiatives talk about what they have been doing in that area. It’s that constant reinforcement. With our planning team we have quarterly updates where we get in a room and spend two hours going over the strategic plan.”
When your plan takes effect, you have to continue to monitor the growth you are seeing. Check your growth against your plan and communicate the results as you go.
“In the long term, you have to absolutely set goals,” Ouellette says. “You have to make sure people understand those goals, and you have to make certain that you’re tracking those goals on at least a quarterly basis. That shows everybody a commitment to it and makes certain that everybody is making a contribution to that plan on a regular basis. Otherwise it’s kind of like college where you go to the classes but the only time you study is for the final. We don’t want that. We want people studying for the final every single month.”
When new initiatives are created it is easy to forget about other areas of your business. It is important to keep tabs on the core areas of your organization.
“You should also make certain that you don’t take your eye off of the core business,” Ouellette says. “Oftentimes because something is new and exciting in the developmental stages, a lot of the resources that you apply to your core business can be siphoned off to go to the new venture. Growing another product line is not an additional duty for the people who are involved in your core business. You have to keep that core business funded properly and the proper attention on it. You have to make the investment in people and in resources to fund that new business.”
