Ever feel like your job has control of your life? The daily grind of running a busy company leaves little time for reflecting on the big picture. Yet time and again I have seen how important this type of planning is to maintaining a successful company. To get the ball rolling, I tell clients to take time out each year for a day or two of company-wide planning.
The strategic planning process will provide a clear and concise roadmap for accomplishing your goals, something every organization needs. In the strategic planning process you and your company will answer the following questions:
- Who is going to accomplish the goals?
- When will they be accomplished?
- How are they going to be accomplished?
A strategic planning session should be held at least once a year for a minimum of one day. In custom building companies with smaller staffs, I have seen it beneficial to include the entire team at the retreat. A good rule of thumb is to limit attendance to around seven or eight key team members.
Attendees should work together to identify the company’s strengths and weaknesses as well as its opportunities and threats, both internal and external. During this session a facilitator should identify all of the team members’ thoughts on a flip chart or some other media. When I facilitate a planning session I wallpaper the room with big pages of ideas. This is the time for participants to let loose and provide positive and negative input on issues that help or hinder the company’s success.
Once the wallpapering job is complete, the next step is to group the ideas into major categories, which I like to call key objectives. All of the items identified should fall into a key objective and should identify some big picture-goals. Examples of key objectives are to improve gross profit by 3 percent or to increase the efficiency of the customer change order process.
Plan the work. What you will find is that a lot of great ideas are developed at the planning session, but because employees must implement these ideas while continuing to excel in day-to-day activities, all of the objectives cannot be accomplished at once. So the next step is to prioritize. Since the team worked together to identify the key objectives I believe that it is important for everyone also to be involved in the prioritization process. All of the team members should work together to come up with a priority list that includes everyone’s input.
Once you have the objectives prioritized the team needs to establish specific deadlines. For example, the key objective of improving gross profit by 3 percent needs to be expanded to improving gross profit on jobs by 1 percent per quarter beginning with the second quarter of the year.
