strategic business plan model

9 Strategic Planning Models and Tools for the Customer-Focused Business

Published: July 11, 2023

As the economist and business strategy guru, Michael Porter, says, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

With strategic planning, businesses identify their strengths and weaknesses, choose what not to do, and determine which opportunities should be pursued. In sales operations, having a clearly defined strategy will help your organization plan for the future, set viable goals, and achieve them.

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So, how do you get started with strategic planning? You‘ll begin with strategic planning models and tools. Let’s take a look at nine of the most prominent ones here.

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Strategic planning models.

Strategic planning is used to set up long-term goals and priorities for an organization. A strategic plan is a written document that outlines these goals.

Don't confuse strategic planning and tactical planning . Strategic planning is focused on long-term goals, while tactical planning is focused on the short-term.

Here are a few strategic planning models you can use to get started.

1. The Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard is one of the most prominent strategic planning models, tailored to give managers a comprehensive overview of their companies' operations on tight timelines. It considers both financial and operational metrics to provide valuable context about how a business has performed previously, is currently performing, and is likely to perform in the future.

The model plays on these concerns: time, quality, performance/service, and cost. The sum of those components amount to four specific reference points for goal-setting and performance measurement:

• Customer: How customers view your business
• Internal Process: How you can improve your internal processes
• Organizational Capacity: How your business can grow, adapt, and improve
• Financial: The potential profitability of your business

Those four categories can inform goals that are more thoughtful and focused while surfacing the most appropriate metrics with which you can use to track them. But the elements you choose to pursue and measure are ultimately up to you. As there's no definitive list, they will vary from organization to organization.

That being said, there‘s a universally applicable technique you can use when leveraging the model—creating a scorecard. This is a document that keeps track of your goals and how you apply them. Here’s an example of what a scorecard might look like:

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The Balanced Scorecard is ideal for businesses looking to break up higher-level goals into more specific, measurable objectives. If you're interested in translating your big-picture ambitions into actionable projects, consider looking into a Balanced scorecard software .

Example of the Balanced Scorecard

Let‘s imagine a B2B SaaS company that sells a construction management solution. It’s been running into trouble from virtually all angles. It‘s struggling with customer retention and, in turn, is hemorrhaging revenue. The company’s sales reps are working with very few qualified leads and the organization's tech stack is limiting growth and innovation.

The business decides to leverage a Balanced Scorecard approach to remedy its various issues. In this case, the full strategic plan—developed according to this model—might look like this:

• The company sets a broad financial goal of boosting revenue by 10% year over year.
• To help get there, it aims to improve its customer retention rate by 5% annually by investing in a more robust customer service infrastructure.
• Internally, leadership looks to improve the company's lead generation figures by 20% year over year by revamping its onboarding process for its pre-sales team.
• Finally, the business decides to move on from its legacy tech stack in favor of a virtualized operating system, making for at least 50% faster software delivery for consistent improvements to its product.

The elements listed above address key flaws in the company‘s customer perception, internal processes, financial situation, and organizational capacity. Every improvement the business is hoping to make involves a concrete goal with clearly outlined metrics and definitive figures to gauge each one’s success. Taken together, the organization's plan abides by the Balanced Scorecard model.

2. Objectives and Key Results

As its name implies, the OKR (objectives and key results) strategic planning model revolves around translating broader organizational goals into objectives and tracking their key results. The framework rests on identifying three to five attainable objectives and three to five results that should stem from each of them. Once you have those in place, you plan tactical initiatives around those results.

After you‘ve figured out those reference points, you determine the most appropriate metrics for measuring their success. And once you’ve carried out the projects informed by those ideal results, you gauge their success by giving a score on a scale from 0 to 1 or 0%-100%.

For instance, your goal might be developing relationships with 100 new targets or named accounts in a specific region. If you only were able to develop 95, you would have a score of .95 or 95%. Here's an example of what an OKR model might look like:

It's recommended that you structure your targets to land at a score of around 70% — taking some strain off workers while offering them a definitive ideal outcome. The OKR model is relatively straightforward and near-universally applicable. If your business is interested in a way to work towards firmly established, readily visible standards this model could work for you.

Example of the Objectives and Key Results

Let's consider a hypothetical company that makes educational curriculum and schedule planning for higher-education institutions. The company decides it would like to expand its presence in the community college system in California, something that constitutes an objective.

But what will it take to accomplish that? And how will the company know if it's successful? Well, in this instance, leadership within the business would get there by establishing three to five results they would like to see. Those could be:

• Generating qualified leads from 30 institutions
• Conducting demos at 10 colleges
• Closing deals at 5 campuses

Those results would lead to initiatives like setting standards for lead qualification and training reps at the top of the funnel on how to use them appropriately, revamping sales messaging for discovery calls, and conducting research to better tailor the demo process to the needs of community colleges.

Leveraging this model generally entails repeating that process between two and four more times, ultimately leading to a sizable crop of thorough, actionable, ambitious, measurable, realistic plans.

3. Theory of Change (TOC)

The Theory of Change (TOC) model revolves around organizations establishing long-term goals and essentially “working backward” to accomplish them. When leveraging the strategy, you start by setting a larger, big-picture goal.

Then, you identify the intermediate-term adjustments and plans you need to make to achieve your desired outcome. Finally, you work down a level and plan the various short-term changes you need to make to realize the intermediate ones. More specifically, you need to take these strides:

• Identify your long-term goals.
• Backward map the preconditions necessary to achieve your goal, and explain why they're necessary.
• Identify your basic assumptions about the situation.
• Determine the interventions your initiative will fulfill to achieve your goals.
• Come up with indicators to evaluate the performance of your initiative.
• Write an explanation of the logic behind your initiative.

Here's another visualization of what that looks like.

This planning model works best for organizations interested in taking on endeavors like building a team, planning an initiative, or developing an action plan. It's distinct from other models in its ability to help you differentiate between desired and actual outcomes. It also makes stakeholders more actively involved in the planning process by making them model exactly what they want out of a project.

It relies on more pointed detail than similar models. Stakeholders generally need to lay out several specifics, including information related to the company's target population, how success will be identified, and a definitive timeline for every action and intervention planned. Again, virtually any organization — be it public, corporate, nonprofit, or anything else — can get a lot out of this strategy model.

Example of the Theory of Change

For the sake of this example, imagine a business that makes HR Payroll Software , but hasn‘t been doing too well as of late. Leadership at the company feels directionless. They think it’s time to buckle down and put some firm plans in motion, but right now, they have some big picture outcomes in mind for the company without a feel for how they're going to get done.

In this case, the business might benefit from leveraging the Theory of Change model. Let‘s say its ultimate goal is to expand its market share. Leadership would then consider the preconditions that would ultimately lead to that goal and why they’re relevant.

For instance, one of those preconditions might be tapping into a new customer base without alienating its current one. The company could make an assumption like, “We currently cater to mid-size businesses almost exclusively, and we lack the resources to expand up-market to enterprise-level prospects. We need to find a way to more effectively appeal to small businesses.”

Now, the company can start looking into the specific initiatives it can take to remedy its overarching problem. Let's say it only sells its product at a fixed price point that suits midsize businesses much more than smaller ones. So the company decides that it should leverage a tiered pricing structure that offers a limited suite of features at a price that small businesses and startups can afford.

The factors the company elects to use as reference points for the plan's success are customer retention and new user acquisition. Once those have been established, leadership would explain why the goals, plans, and metrics it has outlined make sense.

If you track the process I‘ve just plotted, you’ll see the Theory of Change in motion. It starts with a big-picture goal and works its way down to specific initiatives and ways to gauge their effectiveness.

4. Hoshin Planning

The Hoshin Planning model is a process that aims to reduce friction and inefficiency by promoting active and open communication throughout an organization. In this model, everyone within an organization—regardless of department or seniority—is made aware of the company's goals.

Hoshin Planning rests on the notion that thorough communication creates cohesion, but that takes more than contributions from leadership. This model requires that results from every level be shared with management.

The ideal outcomes set according to this model are also conceived of by committee to a certain extent. Hoshin Planning involves management hearing and considering feedback from subordinates to come up with reasonable, realistic, and mutually understood goals.

The model is typically partitioned into seven steps:

• establishing a vision
• developing breakthrough objectives
• developing annual objectives
• deploying annual objectives
• implementing annual objectives
• conducting monthly and quarterly reviews
• conducting an annual review.

Note: The first three steps are referred to as the “catchball process.” It's where company leadership sets goals and establishes strategic plans to send down the food chain for feedback and new ideas. That stage is what really separates Hoshin Planning from other models.

Example of Hoshin Planning

For this example, let‘s imagine a company that manufactures commercial screen printing machines. The business has seen success with smaller-scale, retail printing operations, but realizes that selling almost exclusively to that market won’t make for long-term, sustainable growth.

Leadership at the company decides that it's interested in making an aggressive push to move up-market towards larger enterprise companies. However, before they can establish that vision, they want to ensure that the entire company is willing and able to work with them to reach those goals.

Once they‘ve set a tentative vision, they begin to establish more concrete objectives and send them down the management hierarchy. One of the most pressing activities they’re interested in pursuing is a near-comprehensive product redesign to make their machines better suited for higher volume orders.

They communicate those goals throughout the organization and ask for feedback along the way. After the product team hears their ideal plans, it relays that the product overhaul that leadership is looking into isn‘t viable within the timeframe they’ve provided. Leadership hears this and adjusts their expectations before doling out any sort of demands for the redesign.

Once both parties agree on a feasible timeline, they begin to set more definitive objectives that suit both the company‘s ambitions and the product team’s capabilities.

Strategic Plan Example

The strategic plan above is for a fictitious shoe company and outlines the way in which it'll differentiate itself within the market. It effectively uses each step in the strategic planning model framework and is written in a way to give a brief overview of how the company will enter the market and sustain longevity.

If you're working on a strategic planning model for an existing business, your plan will look similar, but have a few tweaks to the goals, including more goals about improving sales and processes. When drafting the action plan and evaluation parts of the plan, be sure to think tactically about the actions that will help you achieve the goals, and use your mission, vision, and values to guide the choices you make.

Strategic Planning Tools

There are additional resources you can use to support whatever strategic planning model you put in place. Here are some of those:

1. SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool and acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It's used to identify each of these elements in relation to your business.

This strategic planning tool allows you to determine new opportunities and which areas of your business need improvement. You'll also identify any factors or threats that might negatively impact your business or success.

2. Porter's Five Forces

Use Porter‘s Five Forces as a strategic planning tool to identify the economic forces that impact your industry and determine your business’ competitive position. The five forces include:

• Competition in the industry
• Potential of new entrants into the industry
• Power of suppliers
• Power of customers
• Threat of substitute products

To learn more, check out this comprehensive guide to using Porter's Five Forces .

3. Visioning

Visioning is a goal-setting strategy used in strategic planning. It helps your organization develop a vision for the future and the outcomes you'd like to achieve.

Once you reflect on the goals you‘d like to reach within the next five years or more, you and your team can identify the steps you need to take to get where you’d like to be. From there, you can create your strategic plan.

4. PESTLE Analysis

The PESTLE analysis is another strategic planning tool you can use. It stands for:

• P: Political
• E: Economic
• T: Technological
• E: Environmental

Each of these elements allow an organization to take stock of the business environment they're operating in, which helps them develop a strategy for success. Use a PESTLE Analysis template to help you get started.

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Strategic Planning Models, Tools & Frameworks (With Templates)

Organizations are always looking for ways to improve. It’s how they stay relevant and, more importantly, profitable. But you don’t get better just by desiring it. It takes strategy, and then a model to implement that strategy.

No surprise, there are models to accomplish this called strategic planning models. They’re great for businesses, big and small, and assist in project planning and implementing organizational goals in a thorough and structured manner. Once you have decided on an objective, then you must plan a model that will execute it successfully.

There are quite a few strategic planning models, and they can be very different from one another. Often the type of organization will dictate which strategic planning model is used. After a brief explanation, we’ll dig into five of the more popular ones. You’re sure to find a strategic planning model among them that works for you.

What Is a Strategic Planning Model?

It’s easy to define what a strategic planning model is because the definition is embedded in its name! A strategic planning model is how an organization takes its strategy and creates a plan to implement it to improve operations and better meet its goals.

How they get to this point requires identifying what the company wants, and how it hopes to achieve those goals in the near term. Once they have that target clearly defined, then it’s a matter of working backward to figure out how to get there.

This, of course, is easy to say and extremely difficult to do. Sometimes the complexity involved in trying to put together a plan to strategically meet your goals can feel like it needs a strategic planning model all its own! That’s why there are classic models already in place to help you accomplish your goals.

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Do You Need a Strategic Planning Model?

If all this sounds like a fancy way of saying you need a plan to achieve your goals, well, you’re right. But that doesn’t dismiss its usefulness in achieving those objectives. No matter if you’re a startup or an established, market-dominant brand, if you don’t have a plan to reach your goals, you’re bound to fail. That could be losing market share or shuttering, neither of which is a path forward for a viable enterprise.

The benefits of having a strategic planning model are manyfold. For one, it provides a clear path that the organization uses for operational planning which determines what work will be done by everyone on the staff. Having all departments work together for a common goal is powerful. The opposite is disastrous. You can’t hit your target, whether it’s a year or five or 10 years in the future if everyone doesn’t know what it is and how you plan to get there.

Think of it as being focused. There are a lot of distractions that occur every day in every business. Knowing what your topline is helps you prioritize and keep your energies directed on the overall strategy for the company and the right strategic initiatives .

Another positive of having a strategic planning model is that it improves your knowledge of what works best in the organization. You know your strengths and weaknesses, as well as get a clear picture of where you are in the marketplace. It even helps you get a clear idea of who your competition is and how you can differentiate yourself from them.

Best Practices for Strategic Planning Models & Frameworks

We’ll get to the examples in a moment, but regardless of which you choose as most appropriate for your needs, there are best practices to make sure you succeed. When doing the research, assemble a group that is diverse but also appropriate for the goal. Diversity brings more ideas to the table. You’ll want between six and 10 people.

Once you start, give it time. The team needs to come up with creative solutions, and then season them, to make sure they’re the right course of action. You might want to remove the team from the work site. A change of environment, without the distractions of the office, can help them settle into a more contemplative state where they can come up with better ideas.

Of course, you need to get buy-in from the team or else your hard work will be for naught. Once you have them fully on board, build trust. You want everyone to participate, and to do so in a free and open discussion. That means from the boss on down. It might help to hire an outside facilitator to manage the process.

When you have a plan, it must be realistic. If you can’t execute it, then you’ve not done your job. Therefore, it must be actionable, with clearly defined goals , tasks, responsibilities outlined, accountability, deadlines—and all this must be clear to everyone involved. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible. Plans change, so it’s best to not be rigid about it.

Finally, don’t think of creating a strategic planning model for your business as a one-and-done process. Not only must your plan be open to editing as internal and external forces demand, but these meetings should be regularly scheduled. Think of it as a process. Meet monthly if you can, or at least quarterly. You can discuss how the plan is being executed and hold people accountable for what they’ve been tasked to execute. This is how you ensure your plan becomes a reality.

Strategic Planning Models

As we said, there are many models that we encourage you to explore. You never know what you might find. For our purposes, let’s narrow the scope down to five with proven results.

Alignment Model

This strategic alignment model (SAM) is among the most used. It’s made up of two parts—strategic fit and functional integration. What that means is that the model aligns business and IT strategies . To do this requires identifying the key goals of an organization and then what the steps are to reach those goals. The plan must maximize the process to best achieve those goals.

There are four perspectives to guide you in this model:

• Strategy execution is when the business strategy is driving the model.
• Technology potential, which also sees the business strategy as the driver, but with an IT strategy to support it.
• Competitive potential deals with using emerging IT capabilities to create new products and services.
• Lastly, there’s the service level, which focuses on creating the best IT system in the organization.

Here, business strategy is important, but only the launching pad.

Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is made up of clear communications on what is being accomplished. It aligns the work with the overall strategy and prioritizes, measures and monitors progress. The idea is that the model balances strategy with financial measurements. One of the reasons to use BSC is that it helps you see the connections between various parts of your strategic management and planning .

Using BSC means exploring four different aspects of your organization.

• One is the financial performance of the company and what financial resources have been most effective.
• You also want to gauge the performance of your stakeholders or customers and how you serve them.
• Internal processes should be judged on their efficiency, too, but also on quality.
• Then there’s the organizational capacity, which looks at your personnel, infrastructure, tech, culture and whatever else can be used to meet your goals.

We’ve created a free balanced scorecard template for Excel to help you get started with this tool.

Basic Model

Also called the simple model, this is often used by newer organizations that don’t have a history of strategic planning to help guide them in making decisions. But it’s also a fine model for any organization that doesn’t have the time or resources to spend on deep and extensive strategic planning .

First, you establish the mission statement for your organization, if you don’t already have one. That is a summary of your goals that are created to inspire and transform the organization. Next, you want to figure out what goals must be achieved to fulfill the mission statement. From that, break down the tasks that will reach those goals. Schedule, monitor and report on your progress.

Blue Ocean Strategy

The blue ocean strategy is designed to take your product to a market where there is no or little competition. Therefore, the research is heavily tilted towards finding a niche that can be exploited for profit, such as where few businesses are offering a product people have expressed an interest in, and there is little to no pricing pressure.

Unlike red ocean strategy, which describes a market that is saturated and products are threatened by pricing pressure that could threaten the business, blue ocean strategy looks for markets where there’s room to grow. You’re looking to capture new demand, where your product is either unique or so much better as to make competition irrelevant.

Issue (Or Goal) Based

The issue-based model (also called goal-based) is the next step up from the basic strategic planning model. It builds on the basic model and is intended for businesses that are more established. Thus, it’s more in-depth and possibly the most popular of all the models we’ve highlighted.

To begin, use a SWOT analysis, which is an acronym standing for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It helps you identify and analyze internal and external factors that impact your business, product or service. Next comes the mission statement, then planning, creating a budget and a schedule to implement it. After a year, you’ll want to monitor the results and report on its progress , making adjustments as needed.

PEST Analysis

A PEST analysis consists of identifying any political, economic, social and technological factors that can affect a business. It’s especially useful for larger organizations, such as multinational companies whose strategic project management initiatives are the most affected by these types of issues.

It’s important to conduct a PEST analysis before or as you create a strategic plan, so you don’t fail to acknowledge any significant political, economic, social or technological risk that could affect your organization and its ability to achieve its goals.

Hoshin Kanri

This is a strategic planning model that ensures that all levels within an organization understand what the organization’s strategic objectives are. Then those strategic objectives are broken down into specific goals and action plans for employees at all levels of the organization, from executives to production floor employees.

Another important aspect of this strategic planning model is that it involves constant performance tracking and communication between employees and their supervisor which helps track the completion of strategic goals and evaluate their feasibility. This strategic planning model is mostly used by manufacturers who implement lean manufacturing best practices, but it can be used by any type of business.

Porter’s Five Forces Model

This is a fundamental strategic planning model that should be used by any business. It allows business owners, executives and other decision-makers to understand the competitive forces that shape an industry and what they mean for a business.

This model analyzes the rivalry among existing companies, the threat of substitute products, the threat of new competitors, the bargaining power of suppliers and the bargaining power of buyers. Together, these five variables create the business environment to which your organization’s strategy should adapt.

Strategic Planning Tools

Now, here’s a quick overview of some tools that can help you as you go through the process of planning your organizational strategy.

1. Strategic Plan

A strategic plan is a document that describes the strategic direction of an organization by outlining its vision, mission and long-term strategic objectives. It’s a fundamental tool when defining the strategy of your organization for the next three to five years.

The main purpose of a strategic plan is to provide high-level goals for the organization as a whole, known as strategic objectives, which will guide the efforts of the various departments within the organization.

This free strategic plan template for Word helps you capture some of the most important elements of your strategic plan such as your business goals, mission and vision statements, a SWOT analysis, and the operational actions that will be taken to achieve your objectives.

2. Strategy Map

A strategy map is a tool that can help you visualize the strategic objectives of your organization and the relationship between them and group them into the four balanced scorecard perspectives: financial, customer, internal business processes and learning and growth.

These four categories help you establish the relationship between strategic objectives. For example, a strategic objective that’s related to improving your internal business processes will have a positive impact on the customer and financial areas.

3. Strategic Roadmap

A strategic roadmap is a tool that can help you turn your strategic objectives into action plans. To create a strategic roadmap, you’ll need to think about all the different tasks that your team will need to execute to reach its strategic objectives.

Next, you’ll need to estimate the duration of each of those tasks and based on that information, create a timeline. Strategic roadmaps are usually created with Gantt charts, which allow you to create a visual timeline that shows all the different actions your organization will take to achieve its strategic objectives.

4. SWOT Matrix

A SWOT matrix is a simple yet effective strategic planning chart with four quadrants that allow you to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your organization. These four categories describe the internal and external factors that may affect your business’s ability to compete in the market either positively or negatively. Here’s what they mean.

Strengths refer to the internal capabilities of your business which might give it an advantage over its competitors, such as, for example, lower production costs or intellectual property. Weaknesses on the other hand describe the areas of improvement for your business, which can be anything like having higher operational costs than your competitors or lack of brand awareness.

Opportunities refer to the positive external factors such as an underserved market niche or reduced costs of supplies and finally, threats are negative external conditions such as new technologies or new competitors that might replace your product. You must consider these factors before making the strategic plan of your organization so you don’t steer your business in the wrong direction. Our SWOT analysis template helps you document the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business or project.

5. VRIO Framework

VRIO stands for value, rarity, imitability and organization, which are the four lenses the VRIO framework uses to determine whether your organization has a competitive organizational strategy. It can help you audit the competitiveness of your business and find weaknesses in your operational strategy .

By analyzing your organization from these four perspectives, you’ll be able to determine whether your business provides value to customers in a way that’s rare and costly to imitate for your competitors. If so, you have a competitive business strategy that can be sustained over time.

6. Ansoff Matrix

An Ansoff matrix or product-market expansion grid is a strategic planning tool that can help you gauge the risk-reward ratio of growth strategies that involve new products and new markets. It’s got four quadrants that show four different strategies: market penetration, product development, market development and diversification.

It’s a great tool to help you decide which of these strategies is the best for your business. You can create a separate Ansoff matrix for different business units or product lines.

7. GE Matrix

A GE matrix or McKinsey matrix is a tool that helps executives and other decision-makers prioritize which business units within an organization should be invested further and which should be divested based on the industry attractiveness and strength of each business unit. It can also be used for prioritizing what projects are approved and executed by an organization, which is a decision that’s made by executives and the board of directors, as advised by project managers and project management offices (PMOs), who are responsible for their success and ensuring they bring the benefits that are expected.

In simple terms, a GE matrix contrasts the potential benefits of an industry with the current positioning of a business unit to determine whether it will be profitable to invest in it. To do so, you’ll need to analyze variables such as the market size, growth rate, competition level and industry trends. It’s ideal for aligning your projects and business strategy .

How ProjectManager Executes Strategic Planning Models

Now that you know about strategic planning models, and have chosen one to reach your organization’s objective, you have a lot of work ahead of you. ProjectManager is an award-winning tool that organizes strategic plans, so you can execute, monitor and report on their progress.

Start Planning In-Depth With Gantt Charts

You have decided on your target, now you need to know how you get there. That’s as simple as breaking down the goal into realistic tasks, or steps, that end at your objective. You can use a work breakdown structure or collect them on a spreadsheet. Now the fun starts. Upload your tasks into our software, and you get to the planning part of your strategic planning model.

Add duration to your tasks, and they instantly populate the Gantt chart tool timeline. Now, you can see your whole project from start to finish. Add priorities, so your team knows what’s important, and break up the project into phases with our milestone feature. There’s a space on each task to write descriptions that guide your team, and they can collaborate by commenting with one another at the task level to facilitate productivity.

Multiple Views to Tackle Your Projects

There are many ways to work, and we have many tools to get that work done. Besides the Gantt, you can use a task list, calendar or kanban board to manage your work. The board view is especially helpful, as it breaks production into phases and provides transparency into the process, so you can keep traffic flowing and avoid costly bottlenecks.

Monitor Your Progress With Real-Time Dashboards

Part of any strategic planning model isn’t just the planning and execution, but monitoring progress to make sure you’re hitting your targets. We have a real-time dashboard that tracks several project metrics, including project variance, which automatically calculates your planned vs. actual progress.

Related Strategic Planning Content

We’ve created dozens of blogs, templates and guides on project management, operational management and strategic planning. Here’s some content that relates to the strategic planning models and tools we explored above.

• How to Create a Strategic Roadmap for Your Organization
• Operational Strategy: A Quick Guide
• Strategic Project Management: Planning Strategic Projects
• A Quick Guide to Strategic Initiatives

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Strategic Planning: How to Write a Strategic Plan That Works

Learn the essential steps to writing a strategic plan that delivers real results and aligns with your business objectives. Contact us for more information!

Strategic planning is essential for any organization aiming to achieve its long-term goals and sustain growth. ClearPoint Strategy offers a powerful platform that streamlines the strategic planning process, making it easier for your organization to develop, implement, and monitor your strategic initiatives.

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“Why isn’t my strategy working?”

Statistics around the failure rates of corporate strategies vary—some put it as high as 9 out of 10 while others say nearly 7 out of 10.

It doesn’t matter which number is right; both estimates are higher than they should be. That means the majority of organizations are floundering when it comes to crafting and executing their strategy. Many executives, when faced with these stats, are wondering, “How do I avoid coming up short in my strategy?”

But don’t worry—these abysmal statistics don’t mean you’re doomed to failure. You can be in the small percentage of businesses that actually achieve the goals in their strategic plans, and we’re here to tell you how. (You’re already a step ahead of your competitors simply by taking the time to research the problem!)

Over the years, we’ve helped hundreds of clients beat the odds using the steps outlined in the guide below. It covers everything you need to know about strategy planning and execution, from beginning to end, in each of the three critical phases:

• Preparing for strategic planning
• Creating your strategic plan
• Putting your strategic plan into practice

Based on our experience, we know that following this three-phase approach will significantly increase your odds of getting high-quality results. ‍

So let’s get started.

What is Strategic Planning and Why is It Important?

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its direction and long-term goals, creating specific plans to achieve them, implementing those plans , and evaluating the results. On one hand, that definition makes strategy planning sound like a Business 101 concept—define your goals and a plan to achieve them. Unfortunately, the strategic planning process isn’t as straightforward as it seems, especially for large companies.

Some experts say there’s a simple explanation behind the dismal statistics mentioned above: companies are failing to strategize at all. They may talk a good game and be able to explain an innovative new mission, but they cannot articulate the processes and business models that will make it happen.

As a result, nothing about their way of doing business—including their priorities, projects, or culture—changes. Months or years later, strategic leaders are left wondering why the company never achieved what was intended.

This absence of a strategic plan demonstrates why having one is so important.

The strategic planning process is about looking forward, outside the immediate future for your organization, to reach a particular set of goals. But as noted in the definition above, it also involves laying out—step-by-step—how you’re going to get there. Without this foundation in place, you’ll either continue on a path to nowhere, or get caught up in a tornado of urgent activities that may not actually benefit your organization in the long term. Neither of these scenarios will give you the competitive edge you hoped for.

Why Strategic Planning Fails

There are also plenty of organizations that do take steps to fulfill the requirements of strategic planning, yet still fail to see results. These strategies fail for many reasons, including:

• Lack of communication : This is a big one. Research shows that 95% of most companies’ employees don’t understand their organization’s strategy, and 85% of executive leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy.
• Poor research around customer trends, organizational threats, and market opportunities : Companies tend to spend more time on internal issues (resolving conflicts and reconciling budgets) than they do analyzing important external information.
• Lack of management support : Organizations neglect to rally support for middle managers, who are key to making sure strategy is executed on a daily basis.
• Ineffective or inefficient performance evaluations : Organizations dedicate all their time to coming up with a plan, but either forget to follow through by tracking progress or have no organized, reliable way to track performance data.
• Lack of clear priorities : Organizations try to do too much at once and/or fail to identify the right activities that will help them achieve their strategy.
• Insufficient resources : Companies don’t acquire new resources, or shift existing resources, to support identified priorities.
• Disjointed departmental goals and activities : There’s no alignment of departmental goals with organizational strategy. Without everyone working together, goals become more difficult to reach.

Whatever is preventing you from meeting your strategic goals—whether it’s the absence of a strategic plan altogether or an imperfect plan execution—it’s worth your time to address the issue.

Analysis has shown that strategic planning has a positive and significant impact on organizational performance. Most importantly, it enhances an organization’s ability to achieve its goals, but there’s more to it than that. Because strategic planning forces companies to adopt a long-term view, it helps them better prepare for the future, setting them up to initiate influence instead of just responding to situations.

It also strengthens communication between employers and employees. The participation and dialogue that takes place among managers and employees throughout the strategic planning process improves transparency and engagement on everyone’s part.

However, the same team that conducted the above analysis also noted that, for strategic planning to work, it requires some specific ingredients, including formal analysis of the internal and external environment, consideration of several strategic options, and careful consideration around whom to involve during the different steps of the strategic planning process. We’ll go through all these ingredients—and more—in the strategic planning guide that follows.

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1. preparing for strategic planning, - gather your team, set up meetings, and create a timeline, get the right people involved.

Let’s get one thing straight right now: If your organization has turned to you (or your department, a colleague, etc.) and requested that you “make a strategic plan and then report back to the leadership team when you’re done”—stop right where you are. That’s not an effective plan. Why? You need to have buy-in across your organization, and so you need leadership involvement from the beginning.

Now let’s talk about the major player needed for this process: The strategic planner. The strategic planner’s job is to align thoughts from the leadership team with a process the organization can use to execute on their strategy. If this is your role (or even if you’re just highly involved in the process), this guide will be immensely helpful as you navigate the coordination of the strategy.

The strategic planner will also need the help of a cross-functional team that involves members of the board or leadership, along with representatives from finance, human resources, operations, sales, and any other critical functions. We’ll discuss this further when we talk through the Office of Strategy Management.

Set up your strategy review meetings

This is also a good time to think about your strategy review meetings, which are a necessity for staying on track over the long haul. However, try to avoid adding yet another meeting onto everyone’s plates; instead, there may be a current meeting you can replace or redesign to make time for strategy discussion.

For now, decide how often you’ll meet and who should be involved. As for timing, there are three types of strategy review meetings:

• Monthly , where you review progress on projects and initiatives
• Quarterly , where you review progress on strategy and discuss key action items
• Annually , where you review year-to-date performance and adjust the strategy as needed

For each of these, you’ll want to send out calendar invites in advance and make sure people know these meetings are a top priority.

Monthly meetings typically include department heads and subject matter experts. Quarterly review meetings may include department heads and upper management. Annual refresh meetings may include upper levels of management and occasionally board members.

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Create a reasonable timeline.

Next, you need to work out a timeline in which you can complete your strategic plan and move through the process. Reasonable is the key word here, as that depends on your organization’s maturity level with regard to strategic planning.

• If you refresh your strategic plan every year, you might be able to work through this process in 4-5 weeks .
• If you’ve never done strategic planning before, 6 months could be more realistic.

Whatever the case, don’t expect this to be done by the end of the week. You’ll be disappointed.

It’s important to understand strategy vs. tactics . Strategy is focused on the destination and how you are going to get there, and tactics are focused on the specific actions you plan to take along the way.

So while this whole process is focused on your overall strategy (i.e. your long-term goals and how you’ll achieve them), we’ll be placing a lot of emphasis on the smaller steps (i.e. practices, resources, initiatives) you’ll take to get there. Make sure your leadership team knows the difference between strategy and tactics going forward!

Sometimes it is smart to keep leadership out of the tactics, but other times, you might need a strong hand to guide the organization through some details.

- Gather the inputs to your Strategic Plan

Get appropriate background information for your strategic plan.

Now it’s time to dig into your internal and external information.

• Internal inputs : Do you know if one branch of your business is growing faster than another? If so, does this mean you’ll focus more energy on the faster growing area, or shift to help the underperforming areas? These are key questions you’ll have to assess. ‍
• External inputs : You may find that parts of your business have shifted, or outside factors are playing a role in where your business is headed. For example, in the late 1990s, the music industry evolved from albums to streaming, impacting many businesses who were associated with the industry. Or if you’re in the manufacturing industry and do a great deal of business overseas, political unrest or a trade dispute between your country and the foreign one you operate in could impact your strategy.

Once you’ve gathered up the quantitative data from the sources above, you’ll also want to get feedback from a number of different sources:

• Discuss the above findings with your leadership team and managers to see what their thoughts are about the future of the business.
• Talk with board members, customers, and industry experts to see what they think your organization is doing well and what needs improvement. These suggestions could deal with anything from operations to company culture.

Combined, all of this data will help you get a better grasp on the future of the business.

‍ Don’t reinvent the wheel—use our assortment of strategic planning templates to get your strategy up and running more easily. See our most popular templates here.

‍ A SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This exercise offers a helpful way to think about and organize your internal and external data.

• What are your organization’s strong points?
• What are your organization’s weak points?
• Where are your biggest opportunities in the future?
• What are the largest threats to your business?

Sometimes it is helpful to use the SWOT analysis framework to organize your interview questions for your qualitative data gathering.

‍ Porter’s Five Forces is another tool used to find these inputs. It’s a time-honored strategy execution framework built around the competition in your industry. Who are your rivals? What are they doing? You then need to look at the threat of substitutes. Is there another product consumers could purchase instead of your industry’s product, for example, substituting natural gas or solar for coal when it comes to electricity generation?

Now that you’ve prepared for your strategy...

• You have a team of people who can help you with the strategic planning process.
• You have the raw material for strategy evaluation, including internal and external data.
• You can organize your raw data into a SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, or another strategy planning framework as you begin to create your strategic plan.

Pro tip You may have researched risk assessments, core competencies, scenario planning, or industry scans as part of your strategic planning. If you’re wondering where these tools fit, they’re all relevant to this first stage of strategic planning. They help you prepare to create the strategic plan. If you have worked through one of these tools before, the results can act as inputs to help you in the next stage.

2. Creating your strategic plan

You now have all the background information necessary to create your strategic plan! But this plan doesn’t live in a vacuum—so we’ll start by revisiting your mission and vision statements and then get into the nuts and bolts of the planning process.

- Confirm your mission and vision statements.

Mission & vision.

If you haven’t created formal mission and vision statements, this is the time to do so.

• Your mission statement describes what your company does and how it is different from other organizations in your competitive space
• Your vision statement describes a future state of what your organization wants to achieve over time.

Where the mission is timeless, your vision is time-bound and more tangible.

‍ Two tools that will help build your mission and vision statements:

• OAS statement : OAS stands for Objective, Advantage, Scope. Talking through these concepts as they apply to your organization will help formulate a vision that is tangible and interactive. Note that while this exercise may be helpful to you, it is optional. You can read more about creating your OAS statement here .
• Strategic shifts: A second tool some people find helpful is called Strategic Shifts. These are exercises for the leadership team to help them define today’s strategic priorities vs. tomorrow’s . For example, your leadership team may say, “We want to shift from central control to autonomy when it comes to our decision-making capability.” If the whole team can get on the same page with these shifts, it can help tremendously once you define your objectives, measures, and projects.

If you’ve already created mission and vision statements, confirm that both are aligned with your current strategy before proceeding to the next step.

During your search for strategic planning tools, you’ve almost certainly come across a Strategy Pyramid (shown below). This pyramid can be visualized in countless different ways, the order of the pyramid isn’t what’s important. The importance lies in ensuring you’ve chosen the elements in the pyramid that work best for your organization, and making sure those components are going to help you achieve strategic success.

- Build out your five-year plan

Develop the framework that will hold your high-level priorities.

You can use your OAS or Strategic Shift exercises to help you define your priorities and objectives—but more importantly, you need a way to manage these elements. The way to do that is by selecting and developing a strategy management framework that will bring all your priorities together in one cohesive format.

Using a framework such as Balanced Scorecard (BSC), Theory of Change (TOC), or Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is critical to your strategic success. Many management teams fail at this point simply because of their disorganization!

Note: Choose only one of these three frameworks, as they have numerous similarities!

The Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard , developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, has been one of the world’s top strategy management frameworks since its introduction in the early 1990s. Those who use the BSC do so to bring their strategy to life, communicate it across their organization , and track their strategy progress and performance.

‍ The BSC divides up your objectives by perspectives—financial, customer, process, and people—and themes, like innovation, customer management, operational excellence, etc. (The idea of perspectives is fully developed in Norton and Kaplan’s book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action .) Here’s an example:

• Financial goals —“What financial goals do we have that will impact our organization?”
• Customer goals —“What things are important to our customers, which will in turn impact our financial standing?”
• Process goals —“What do we need to do well internally, to meet our customer goals, that will impact our financial standing?”
• People (or learning and growth) goals —“What skills, culture, and capabilities do we need to have in our organization to execute on the process that would make our customers happy and ultimately impact our financial standing?”

For an in-depth look at how your organization could use the BSC, check out this Full & Exhaustive Balanced Scorecard Example .

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Theory Of Change (TOC)

The Theory of Change is a logic model that describes a step-by-step approach to achieving your vision. The TOC is focused on how to achieve the change you’re looking for , and is popular amongst mission-driven organizations who are describing a change they’re making in the world instead of putting change in their pockets.

The idea behind TOC is that if you have the right people doing the right activities, they’ll affect change on your customers, which will impact your financials, and bring you closer to your vision. A great example of a this theory of change is the nonprofit RARE .

According to the Harvard Family Research Project , the steps to create a TOC are:

• Identify a long-term goal.
• Conduct “backwards mapping” to identify the preconditions necessary to achieve that goal.
• Identify the interventions that your initiative will perform to create these preconditions.
• Develop indicators for each precondition that will be used to assess the performance of the interventions.
• Write a narrative that can be used to summarize the various moving parts in your theory.

Objectives & Key Results (OKR)

OKR was originally created by Intel and is used today in primarily two ways: At the enterprise/department level and at the personal performance level.

• Objectives are goals.
• Key results are quantitative measures that define whether goals have been reached.

Claim your FREE Excel OKR template to set and achieve key objectives here

The idea is that your defined objectives and measurements help employees, managers, and executives link to and align with overall strategic priorities. Not only does OKR strive to measure whether objectives are successful, but also how successful they are.

Define your objectives, measures, and projects.

‍ The strategic planning frameworks above are all meant, in different ways, to help you organize your objectives, measures, and projects. So it’s critical that these elements are well thought-out and defined.

Here’s how objectives, measures, and projects interact:

‍ You have a high-level goal in mind—your objective. Your measures answer the question, “How will I know that we’re meeting our goal?” From there, initiatives, or projects, are put in place to answer the question, “What actions are we taking to accomplish our goals?”

‍ We’ve defined each of these concepts more thoroughly below with a few business strategy examples:

• Objectives are high-level organizational goals. The typical BSC has 10-15 strategic objectives.

Examples include:

• Increase Market Share Through Current Customers (Financial)
• Be Service Oriented (Customer)
• Achieve Order Fulfillment Excellence Through On-Line Process Improvement (Internal)
• Align Incentives And Rewards With Employee Roles For Increased Employee Satisfaction (Learning & Growth)
• Measures help you understand if you’re accomplishing your objectives strategically. They force you to question things like, “How do I know that I’m becoming an internationally recognized brand?” Note that while your measures might change, your objectives will remain the same. You may select 1-2 measures per objective, so you are aiming to come up with 15-25 measures at the enterprise level.
• Cost Of Goods Sold
• Customer Satisfaction & Retention
• Percentage Of Product Defects
• Percentage Of Response To Open Positions
• Initiatives are key action programs developed to achieve your objectives. You’ll see initiatives referred to as “projects,” “actions,” or “activities outside of the Balanced Scorecard.” Most organizations will have 0-2 initiatives underway for every objective (with a total of 5-15 strategic initiatives).
• Develop Quality Management Program
• Install ERP System
• Revamp Supply Chain Process
• Develop Competencies Mode

- Create your strategy map or graphic strategic model

Whether or not you’re using a Balanced Scorecard as your strategy framework, you’ll benefit from using a graphic model to represent your strategic plan. While many people use a strategy map (shown in the example below), you could also use icons or a color-coding system to visually understand how the elements of your strategy work together.

If you’re just becoming familiar with how strategy mapping works, this article will teach you exactly how to read one—and what you need to do to create one.

Get your FREE eBook with Balance Scorecard strategy maps for better strategic visualization

Now that you’ve created your strategic vision...

• You have a fully-defined mission and vision to use as you move forward with your strategy implementation process.
• You have chosen a strategic framework that will hold your five-year strategic plan.
• You have defined objectives, measures, and projects, and you know how they work together.
• You have a graphic representation of your strategic model.

Feeling the strategic fatigue? It’s okay! This is a tiring process—so be careful to tailor everything in this section to what those in your organization will tolerate. Putting your strategic plan into practice (our final step) is the key to making it all work during the strategy implementation plan, and getting these details 80% right in a timely fashion is much more important than getting them 100% right in a year.

3. Putting your strategic plan into practice

You’ve made it this far—now you have to be sure you launch correctly! To do so, you need someone from the Office of Strategy Management to push that process, ensure resources are aligned to your strategy, put a solid strategy communication program in place, and get technology to keep you organized.

- Launch your strategy

Ensure the office of strategy management (osm) is pushing things forward.

The Office of Strategy Management is comprised of a group of people responsible for coordinating strategy implementation. This team isn’t responsible for doing everything in your strategy, but it should oversee strategy execution across the organization. Typically, the OSM lives in the finance department—or it could be its own separate division that reports directly to the CEO.

Create your internal and external strategy communication plan

Internal— Be sure all elements of your strategy—like strategy maps or logic models—are contained within a larger strategic plan document. (If you use strategy software , the strategic plan document will likely be contained there.) A great way to be sure your leadership team has a firm grasp on your strategy is to ensure they each have a copy of this document, and they can describe the strategy easily to someone who wasn’t involved in the creation process .

More broadly, the strategy must be communicated throughout your organization. You should be shouting it from the rooftops to keep it top-of-mind across your organization. People won’t give it a passing thought unless you engage them—so every department head should be charged with explaining how their team fits into the strategy and why it matters. For actionable tips, check out this article that highlights how you can effectively communicate your strategic plan across your organization.

‍ External— You also need to be sure you have a plan for communicating your strategy outside the organization—with board members, partners, or customers (particularly if your organization is municipal or nonprofit). Think through how it will be shared, and which parts of it are relevant to outside parties.

Align your resources to your strategy

In the short term—which would be your next budgeting cycle or something similar—work to structure the budget around the key components of your strategy. You don’t need to completely rewire your budget, but you do need to create direct linkages between how your resources are allocated and how those efforts support your strategy. Over time, the areas that contribute less directly to strategic goals will become clear, and you can work on gradually aligning everything you fund.

But even if your budget only extends through the fiscal year, consider how you’ll align your strategy to projects in the future. For future resource allocation, link your operations (what some refer to as the “work planning process”) to your strategy. Your expectation should be that the process of aligning your resources to your strategy can happen within year two of your strategic planning execution.

- Evaluate your strategy

At this point, your strategy has been launched: Now you need to know whether or not you’re making progress! Here’s how to do that.

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Create reports to highlight your results

Ten years ago, you may have evaluated your strategy annually. But in today’s business environment, that’s not a feasible option. At a minimum, you should be reporting on your entire strategy on a quarterly basis, or breaking down your strategy into pieces and reporting on one of those pieces each month.

The report you use should highlight progress on your measures and projects, and how those link to your objectives. The point is to show how all these elements fit together and relate to the strategic plan as a whole.

Hold regular strategy meetings

Report on strategy progress via the quarterly or monthly review meetings you scheduled early in the process.

It’s important to note that throwing together an impromptu meeting to go over results isn’t going to get you anywhere. Instead, your strategy review meetings should be meticulously organized and accompanied by an agenda. (See this article for a sample agenda.)

‍ Your meetings should revolve around three key issues:

• What is your organization trying to accomplish? This may include reiterating your mission and vision to add context around the conversation.
• Are you making progress toward these goals? You might review key metrics and the status of initiatives and milestones.
• What actions need to be taken to continue making progress? If metrics are off-track, for example, what can be done to get back on course.

Encourage candid dialogue and make sure the discussion stays focused.

You may want a facilitator for the first few meetings, and you may want to script a few open discussions where a goal owner explains why they are behind schedule (red) on their goal, and the business leader offers support, not criticism. This will generate the atmosphere you need for everyone to start reporting honestly and working together to achieve the organization’s goals.

Deploy strategy reporting software (if you haven’t already)

To make strategy execution work, reporting is unavoidable. While you might be able to track your first strategy meeting in Excel or give your first presentation via PowerPoint, you’ll quickly realize you need some kind of software to track the continuous gathering of data, update your projects, and keep your leadership team on the same page.

If you want to learn more about the major areas of responsibility you should be covering in your strategy management process—and how strategy software can help with that— take a look at our ClearPoint tour .

Here are two additional helpful pieces of content as you move forward:

You’ve probably seen reference to the “Plan, Do, Check, Act” framework before. If you want to integrate this checklist, this is the time to do so. Here’s a breakdown on what it means:

• Plan refers to creating your strategic plan.
• Do refers to making progress on or executing on the plan.
• Check refers to the reporting and monitoring process.
• Act refers to taking action through projects, work plans, or the budgeting process to continue to manage and execute on the strategy.

The Benefits Of Strategic Planning (& Challenges You Should Be Aware Of)

Done right, strategy planning can benefit your business tremendously, but a certain degree of stick-to-itiveness is required to get the job done. (As we noted at the beginning of this guide, organizations that actually meet their strategic objectives are in the minority. Don’t worry, though, yours can be one of the success stories.) But those that develop a disciplined approach to both planning and execution have been shown to improve performance significantly.

‍ Why is strategic planning so effective? Because it fosters healthy organizational practices that drive better outcomes. Engaging in strategic planning will benefit you in multiple ways:

1. You have quality data available to support better decisions

Setting goals and choosing the relevant metrics to track progress toward achieving them means you always have meaningful data to reference. That naturally leads to faster, more efficient decision-making, especially when that data is readily accessible to employees at every level.

Timely, valid, and actionable information is especially valuable in situations where organizations need to react quickly, so they can make the best decisions possible for all their stakeholders.

2. You allocate resources more effectively

In Chapter 3, we discussed structuring the budget around the key components of your strategy. Doing so helps ensure resources are allocated correctly, and in a way that aligns with your goals.

Tying the budget directly to goals also makes it easy to adjust when necessary, if circumstances change and new goals are prioritized over old. For example, a local government may have had a goal to develop a green infrastructure plan at the beginning of 2020, but then had to pivot with the onset of COVID-19.

To support a new goal of developing a COVID-19 response plan, they could simply review the resources used by current projects, evaluate those projects’ priorities and budget needs in comparison to the new goal, and reallocate funds as necessary.

3. You maintain focus

Having a strategic plan brings your main focus points to the forefront, so you don’t have to dig into the details of everything your organization is doing. That means there’s no time wasted analyzing irrelevant and extensive data points in strategic meetings; instead, everyone stays focused on what is most important or where improvements need to be made.

4. You improve communication and build employee engagement.

Strategic planning is intended to create a single, focused vision of where an organization is headed. When that shared vision is communicated clearly and consistently, it inspires employees to take ownership over their role in the plan, and they are typically more motivated to do their best work. High engagement will directly impact your organization’s financial health and profitability.

3 Things To Consider Before You Embark On A Strategic Plan

Having helped hundreds of organizations—for-profit, nonprofit, and local governments included—navigate through the strategic planning and implementation process, we’ve seen firsthand the many challenges that arise along the way. There’s no “typical” scenario, but there are some common pitfalls that have the power to make or break your chances of success. Below are three things you should be aware of going into the process.

1. Everything about strategic planning takes time

Don’t expect your plan to materialize after a few meetings. The initial planning activities usually unfold over the space of several months, but strategy execution itself is an ongoing process. Anticipate devoting extensive time and effort in particular to:

• Choosing the appropriate planning model . Before you can even begin to articulate your strategy, you need to choose a strategy framework that fits your organization’s needs. All models can be customized to suit the way your business works, but this is a key decision that will shape all your efforts going forward.
• Creating a plan that everyone agrees on. It’s crucial for your leadership team to support the plan’s objectives if you want it to be adopted. Making sure everyone on the team has been heard and gaining a consensus is a time-consuming process.
• Getting “buy-in” for the plan. Research shows that, on average, 95% of an organization’s employees don’t understand its strategy—there’s no surer way to guarantee failure than to neglect communicating your goals to your employees. You must continuously keep your strategy top-of-mind in a creative and meaningful way over the long term to gain the buy-in you need to succeed.

2. There is a danger of “analysis paralysis”

Data and analytics are an integral part of strategic planning. And while it may be tempting to use all your available metrics, charts, and graphs for every business decision, doing so unnecessarily can be a detriment to the decision-making process. It’s easy to find yourself drilling deeper into data when perhaps only a high-level view of the information is needed. Avoid squandering time and energy on excessive analysis by making sure the right people are focusing on the right data and actions:

Leadership should focus on organization-wide goals and progress. Teams should focus on the individual projects and daily tasks that are helping to accomplish those goals (and the data that goes with them).

3. Having a plan doesn’t mean your organization will execute on it

Good planning is only half the battle; the lion’s share of forward progress is in executing that plan. But the execution stage is where many organizations stumble. They aren’t prepared for the work involved with follow-through, both in terms of the time commitment and the tools necessary to support performance improvement. Strategy consultants are excellent guides for plan creation, but most offer no guidance on how to carry it out; as a result, organizations are left floundering.

It’s imperative to have a system in place that will measure and monitor your progress toward goals during the execution phase. Performance management tools like ClearPoint allow organizations to track a variety of metrics related to strategic projects, helping to maintain focus over the long term. And our team of strategy implementation experts is always available to provide guidance on every aspect of execution, from setting up an efficient management process to using our reporting tools optimally.

With the right plan in place, tools to support it, and committed leadership, every organization has a good chance of seeing their strategy come to life.

See ClearPoint Strategy in action! Click here to watch our quick 6-minute demo

You’ve made it through these steps…..

...but be sure to place a great deal of emphasis on rightsizing this process for your own organization.

Did you recently do a SWOT analysis and create new vision and mission statements? Don’t do it again.

Do you already manage with a robust set of KPIs ? Use them.

Do you currently create reports for your board and management team? Modify them or use a strategy evaluation framework to make sure they’re focused and move on.

Rather than doing everything, it’s more important to realize there is overlap between these steps. Understand how they all fit into your own strategic planning process, and then move forward with the sections you’re missing.

And if you have any questions along the way, get in touch with us. We live and breathe strategic planning and are here to help!

Transform Your Strategic Planning with ClearPoint Strategy Software

Struggling with the execution of your strategic plans? You’re not alone. ClearPoint Strategy is here to turn your strategic planning around.

Our software is designed to address the common pitfalls in strategy execution, such as poor communication, misaligned goals, and ineffective tracking. By booking a demo with us, you’ll see firsthand how ClearPoint can enhance transparency, improve alignment, and boost execution efficiency across your organization.

Don't let your strategic efforts fail—discover how ClearPoint Strategy empowers you to be among the few who successfully achieve their strategic goals. Book your demo today and start making your strategy work for you!

Book your FREE 1-on-1 DEMO with ClearPoint Strategy

Ted Jackson

Ted is a Founder and Managing Partner of ClearPoint Strategy and leads the sales and marketing teams.

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9 effective strategic planning models for your business

Strategic planning models can make a big difference to your organization. That remains true whether you’re a startup developing an overall strategy or an established business fine-tuning internal processes.

But there are many strategic planning models, and it’s vital to pick one that suits your purpose and needs. The right framework will help you streamline processes, drive alignment, and propel your business.

To help your research process, we’ve compiled a list of the most effective strategic planning models and their top use cases. Let’s take a look.

🧐 Looking for a flexible framework to help you reach your business objectives? Leapsome’s goal management tools fit any strategic planning process. 👉 Learn more

What is a strategic planning model?

A strategic planning model is a framework that allows organizations to map out their short- and long-term business plans. They can help:

• Identify and overcome obstacles 
• Improve and streamline operations
• Reach overarching business goals
• Create alignment between different departments
• Track progress over time

And you don’t have to limit your organization to one strategic planning model. Businesses can benefit from using multiple approaches, even simultaneously. But different strategic planning models are best suited for different situations, so make your choice based on your business type, growth stage, priorities, and goals. 

9 models for strategic planning

These are some of the most popular strategic planning models. Our list covers a definition of each model, an example of it in action, and which use cases it works best for.

1. Objectives & key results (OKRs)

OKRs are a popular goal-setting framework that organizations, teams, and individuals use to define long-term objectives and track progress. To better understand the meaning of OKRs , let’s unpack the acronym:

• Objectives — ambitious but achievable long-term goals
• Key results — milestones used to measure progress toward each objective

When establishing your OKRs, create quarterly objectives for all company levels — Leapsome has a free OKR template to help you get started. Then, revisit your OKRs regularly to monitor your progress and make adjustments if necessary. You can also introduce regular OKR meetings to your organization’s internal processes.

OKR example

Here’s an example of an OKR for a B2B SaaS company:

Objective | Significantly scale our customer base and deliver our great product to more people

• Key results: 
• Increase sales conversion rate from 25% to 30%
• Reduce user churn from 5% to 3%
• Publish a successful case study on our website every quarter
• Achieve a minimum of 4.7 out of 5 rating across all major review sites

OKRs work best for organizations that want to create more alignment behind their goals. By breaking down company-wide objectives into smaller, more manageable tasks, OKRs ensure everyone works toward a common purpose.

‍ OKRs also show employees how their work contributes to the big picture, giving them a sense of purpose and boosting employee engagement . Research by Gallup links engaged employees to lower turnover rates, better work performance, and a thriving work culture. Consequently, OKRs help companies build successful workplaces.

💡 Wondering how to introduce OKRs to your organization? Use Leapsome’s flexible framework to set company-wide objectives and track them in one intuitive place. 👉 Learn more

2. SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for strengths , weaknesses , opportunities , and threats . Use the SWOT model to define internal and external factors affecting your business. Then, compare the different factors to assess the risk of a potential strategy. 

For example, if your organization’s strengths match opportunities in the market — say, you have a lot of capital, and your competitors don’t — you know you have a competitive advantage. In that scenario, you can take an offensive business strategy with relatively low risk.

SWOT example

Here’s a SWOT example for a sales-based organization:

• Strengths — We have an excellent rapport with our customers and a loyal customer base.
• Weaknesses — Our current supply chain is inadequate.
• Opportunities — There’s high customer demand for one of our products.
• Threat — Our main competitor is developing a similar product.

Based on this SWOT analysis, our example organization isn’t in a strong strategic position. There’s a risk they won’t produce or distribute enough of their product to meet demand, and their competitor has the potential to outperform them. They should prioritize optimizing their product offering and solving supply chain issues over generating leads or working on an aggressive marketing campaign.

Any business can benefit from SWOT analysis. However, it’s best to use it at the beginning stages of a new strategy and with a specific goal in mind. You could try a SWOT approach when deciding priorities, like implementing new technology or restructuring your organization.

3. PEST or PESTLE analysis

PEST analysis focuses on external factors that can affect your organization. The letters stand for:

• Socio-cultural
• Technological

And depending on your industry, you might add legal and environmental factors to make PESTLE. 

PEST or PESTLE example

Here’s an example of a PESTLE analysis for a multinational confectionery company:

• Political factors — The government of a country where we sell many products is planning to raise import tariffs.
• Economic factors — Our target demographic (13 to 21-year-olds) has more disposable income now that Covid-19 restrictions have been lifted.
• Socio-cultural factors — Surveys report that customers consider our products healthy.
• Technological factors — Engineers devised a more efficient way to farm the main ingredient in half our products.
• Legal factors — The FDA approved our latest chocolate bar.
• Environmental factors — NGOs are pressuring us to use more environmentally friendly processes.

PEST analysis lets you assess the business environment for a product or service, so it’s best used during the beginning stages of a project.

4. The Balanced Scorecard framework

The Balanced Scorecard framework lets you take a holistic approach to business planning that doesn’t just focus on economic performance. Instead, you look at four perspectives: 

• Financial perspective — how well your organization is performing economically
• Customer perspective — your customer satisfaction and retention levels
• Internal business perspective — the quality and efficiency of your internal operations
• Innovation and learning perspective — your ability to improve, pivot, and grow your business

Then, create objectives and define measures to track your progress for each perspective. Those measures will support you in planning and executing initiatives to achieve your goals. And as you carry out this strategy, you can update your scorecard to show your progress.

Balanced Scorecard example

The management at ECI (Electronic Circuits Inc.) wanted to improve their delivery times. But when they talked to customers about the issue, the organization received unreliable feedback — different people had different definitions of being ‘on time.’

Using the Balanced Scorecard framework, managers shifted focus to their operations and checked the efficiency of their manufacturing process. They discovered ways to optimize the business’s cycle time, yield, and costs. 

Despite not having a reliable customer perspective, the Balanced Scorecard’s comprehensive overview of the ECI organization provided a versatile solution for reducing delivery times and streamlining the business’s overall operations.

The Balanced Scorecard framework is best for understanding your business health and creating alignment across your company.

5. Porter’s Five Forces

Porter’s Five Forces is an approach that lets you assess your product or service’s competitive advantage in the market. Identifying potential threats can guide your organization in developing a more dynamic strategic plan.

The ‘Five Forces’ that may affect your product are:

• The threat of new competitors — Are many new businesses popping up in your industry? How easy is it for new companies to develop a product or service similar to yours?
• The number of existing competitors — How many direct competitors are you contending with? What about adjacent competitors? Are any of them growing quickly?
• The bargaining power of suppliers — Could suppliers put pressure on you to lower costs or change your business model?
• The bargaining power of customers — Are your products or services available elsewhere? Is there a demand for them? Do people have issues with your pricing or quality?
• The threat of a substitute — How likely is a similar product or service to enter the market?

Porter’s Five Forces example

Let’s take the example of a cosmetics company planning to release a shampoo with SPF 50:

• The threat of new competitors — The shampoo requires expertise to develop, which is an obstacle for competitors entering the market.
• The number of existing competitors — Two companies with similar products are poised to grow. They could create an almost identical product and pressure them to lower costs.
• The bargaining power of suppliers — There’s a large number of suppliers, so they have little bargaining power.
• The bargaining power of customers — Depending on where customers live, they’ll consider the shampoo a seasonal product. As it’s almost winter in the countries with the largest customer base, demand is lower.
• The threat of a substitute — Research suggests that no products currently in development could fill the same need (protecting the scalp from sunburn).

Porter’s Five Forces are best for evaluating your product or service after development but before entering the market. It’s also helpful for assessing an organization’s overall competitive position. 

6. The VRIO framework

The VRIO framework helps organizations determine whether they can turn a resource into a competitive advantage. These can be physical resources like inventory, tools, and technology, or nonphysical ones like patents, skills, and work culture.

Let’s break down the VRIO acronym to understand how to evaluate each resource:

• Valuable — The resource increases revenue or decreases operational costs.
• Rare — The resource is limited or you control the supply.
• Inimitable — The resource is unique or complex, meaning it’s difficult for competitors to copy.
• Organizational — Your organization can exploit the full potential of the resource.

VRIO example

Here’s an example of a delivery company determining whether they can exploit their resource — distribution centers — to gain a competitive advantage:

• Valuable — All the distribution centers are in strategic positions, which makes them a valuable resource as the company can use their location to create more efficient delivery routes.
• Rare — The distribution network is a scarce resource because there are only a few ports for international delivery.
• Inimitable — Competitors could build distribution centers in nearby locations.
• Organizational — Delivery drivers aren’t using the most efficient routes between distribution centers.

The delivery company could have a temporary competitive advantage, but they’re not exploiting this resource. Management needs to address whatever stops delivery drivers from using the fastest route before rival delivery companies copy and control the same resource. ‍

The VRIO framework works best for businesses deciding how to launch a new product or service or determining how to improve their existing business model. 

Specifically, the organizational metric shows how efficiently your organization uses its resources. If you have a high score for the first three metrics but consistently fail to capture the value of your resources, it’s a sign you need to improve your internal processes.

Combine the VRIO framework with Porter’s Five Forces for a clear strategic direction when launching a new product.

7. The Hoshin Planning framework

The Hoshin Planning framework is mainly a top-down approach. This method outlines seven strategic planning stages, which are:

• Define your vision to clarify your organization’s primary purpose.
• Develop your main objectives to give your organization a competitive advantage.
• Break down objectives into smaller annual goals.
• Set goals across your entire organization — at C-level, managerial, departmental, and individual levels.
• Implement your plans.
• Perform monthly reviews to reflect and monitor progress.
• Do an annual review to determine if you’ve achieved your goals and what to work on next.

It’s worth noting that the Hoshin Planning framework doesn’t have to be strictly top-down. Another core idea behind this method is that managers should ‘play catch ball’ — that is, bounce ideas between management, department heads, and team members during the first four stages.

Hoshin Planning example

Here’s how a car manufacturer might implement the Hoshin Planning framework:

• Management shares their vision of developing the most innovative technology on the market.
• They decide their main goal is to develop the first self-driving car by the end of 2025. But when leadership talks to the head of engineering, they say this breakthrough won’t be possible by 2025. They collectively adjust the deadline to 2027.
• Management breaks this goal down into smaller targets. One of them is mapping out what the self-driving car should be able to do in every scenario. The engineering department agrees with this plan.
• ​​Those targets inform detailed initiatives, like observing real-life driving incidents and collecting data on traffic and accidents.
• All parties carry out the agreed-upon initiatives. After a month, management conducts a meeting to check everyone’s progress.
• A year later, the engineering department has data on most scenarios the self-driving car would encounter on the road.

Companies with complex processes — like manufacturing and tech businesses — are more likely to use the Hoshin Planning framework. Their operations benefit from the ‘catch ball’ idea because it’s easier to spot problems when you filter them through diverse teams.

The Hoshin Planning Framework is also ideal for creating alignment within your company. Consider it for a larger organization that’s experienced project issues and bottlenecks.

8. The Theory of Change model

The Theory of Change model involves establishing long-term goals and working backward. Start with your desired outcome and go through all preconditions necessary for it to become a reality. During this process, you determine what needs to change to reach your objectives.

Theory of Change example

Nonprofit organizations with specific missions often use the Theory of Change model. Take adult literacy, for example. The project team would start with an ideal situation — like their country having a 100% literacy rate — and work backward to find out what’s preventing them from achieving that aim. The issues might range from a lack of funding to a need to increase awareness about resources that are already available. Then, the nonprofit team could start addressing the issues they identified.

Any organization can benefit from the Theory of Change framework. Still, it works best for specific projects, like expanding your company abroad or opening a new department, as it involves scenario planning. 

9. The Blue Ocean strategy

The Blue Ocean strategy is a strategic planning model that’s become popular recently. Developed in 2004, this method assesses whether your organization operates in a saturated market. If so, the underlying assumption of the Blue Ocean strategy is that it’s better to create new demand.

In the strategy, the ‘ocean’ is a metaphor for the market. The ‘red ocean’ is full of predators (large companies) competing for food (customers) and turning the water red, whereas the ‘blue ocean’ is deep, unexplored water that’s full of potential (uncontested market space). Here’s a list of indicators that you’re in a ‘blue ocean’:

• You’ve found uncontested market space
• You’ve made the competition irrelevant
• You’re creating and capturing new demand
• You’re breaking the value-cost trade-off

Blue Ocean example

Apple is a famous example of a business that operates in a ‘blue ocean.’ Although it’s one of the leading technology companies in the world, the Apple team still prefers to innovate new products rather than beat the competition.

The Blue Ocean strategy is ideal for small businesses and start-ups trying to establish themselves among larger organizations. Established companies in dynamic industries like tech can also use it to stay ahead of their competition.

How to implement a strategic planning model

Once you’ve set up your strategic plan, you’ll want to utilize it to its full potential. Here are some tips to make sure your strategy goes into action.

Align your approach to strategic planning with your values

There are many strategic planning models to choose from, and your organization can only implement so many. Although all of them have pros and cons, none are necessarily better than the others. So, choose the strategic planning models that reflect your organization’s values. That way, it’ll be easier to introduce your strategy and get all team members on board.

If you’re a people-first organization, OKRs are an ideal choice. OKRs involve your employees in company initiatives, make internal decisions more transparent, and give everyone a sense of purpose. 

Allocate resources to the strategic planning process

Strategic planning is like any other task: It requires resources like funding, time, and research. You should have a budget and schedule for every part of the process.

The employees helping you with strategic planning and implementation are also vital assets — offer them training and consistent support. Free up their schedule for strategic planning and create a timeline for the entire process to set your team up for success. ‍

Review your progress

Aside from planning and implementing your strategy, you’ll need to check on your progress regularly. That means monthly and annual reviews at all levels.

Many strategic planning models already have reviews built into their stages. But even if they don’t, you should reevaluate at regular intervals. You can define some key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your initiatives and your overall business health. Popular KPIs include revenue growth, client retention rate, and employee satisfaction.

Be ready to adjust your strategic plan

As the saying goes, even the best-laid plans often go awry. You may find that conditions change as you implement your strategic plan or that you didn’t predict certain issues. The key isn’t necessarily to strategize better, but to have a dynamic strategy. This will allow you to adjust your plan and deal with problems as they arise.

For instance, you might opt for the PEST analysis, but be open to considering important legal and environmental factors when they come up. You can try to predict what new legislation or world events may affect your industry. Then, if any conditions arise that affect your business, you’ll be able to pivot your strategy without too much additional effort.

Boost your organization’s performance with strategic planning models

Strategic planning models help you assess the current state of your organization, decide which direction to take in the future, and communicate your plans to your employees. They can be the difference between your business merely sustaining itself and thriving.

If you’re wondering how to implement a new strategic planning model, Leapsome can offer professional support. Our Goals and OKR Management Software provides an adaptable framework for your chosen strategic model.

🚀 Kickstart your strategic plan with Leapsome Our goals and OKR management tools make it easy to implement your strategy of choice. 👉 Book a demo

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Top frameworks for strategic planning

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

If you want to stay ahead in business, you need to constantly be improving. It’s how you stay relevant and remain profitable. But improvement and success don’t come just because you want them enough—you need to develop a strategic plan that details:

Where you are right now: Look at your current strategic position relative to your competition. Describe your current problems keeping you from progressing. Define your mission, vision, and values.  

Where you want to go: Describe your competitive advantage and understand where your organization is currently headed. Look for ways to solve your current problems.

How you will get there: Define your goals, objectives, and the steps you will need to take to achieve your goals.

This is an oversimplification of the strategic planning process. There are many different strategic planning models you can use that expand on these three basic elements.

Let’s look at some strategic planning frameworks that will help you to see where you can improve, define your goals, and map out the processes and procedures you will use to keep achieving your goals.

Strategic planning models vs. strategic planning frameworks

A strategic planning model maps out how your company plans to implement a strategy for improving operations, delivering quality, and meeting specific goals. It is like a template or a tool you use at the beginning of the planning process. It helps you flesh out the ideas that will take you where you want to go. 

A strategic planning framework outlines how you will conceptually approach your strategic plan. Frameworks tend to be visual and detail the activities that are performed in your organization’s strategy plan. Think of the framework as a blueprint or the foundation for your messaging and brand narrative. The idea is to communicate to internal and external stakeholders the aspirations of your strategic plan. 

Common strategic planning models

Why is a planning model important? Because it’s hard to achieve your company’s goals if your employees don’t know what the goals are or how you plan to reach them. 

Strategic planning models are the roadmaps that keep your team focused on what needs to be completed to reach your goals. And you will need to constantly monitor and review your plans to ensure that you quickly address issues and realign processes as necessary to keep your production working as smoothly as possible.

The following are a few strategic planning process models that can help you to create the roadmap your team will follow to success.

Basic model

Sometimes called the simple model, the basic model is often used by companies that:

• Are new and don’t have a lot of experience with or are new to strategic planning
• Are small and don’t have the resources to develop complex plans
• Don’t have too many serious problems to solve
• Don’t have a lot of time to create an extensive plan

This model focuses on establishing your company vision and mission statement, setting goals to make the vision a reality, outlining specific steps to take to reach the goals, and monitoring progress to keep everybody on track and to address issues when they come up.

Issue-based model

This model is also known as the goal-based model. It’s essentially an extension of the basic model. The issue-based model is more dynamic and popular with established companies to develop more comprehensive plans.

Alignment model

The goal of this model is to align your business and IT strategies with the company’s strategic goals. This model is good for organizations that need to reassess objectives or correct problem areas that impede progress.

Like the issue-based model, this model has you look at your internal operations to develop a strategy. The model involves the following steps:

• Review your vision, mission statement, and company goals.
• Determine what is currently working well and what needs to be realigned.
• Make suggestions for improving the problem areas.
• Implement changes to improve or eliminate weak areas.

Scenario model

This model looks at different outside influences that could have an impact on your organization. For example, government regulations can have a big impact on a manufacturer, such as what materials can be used to make their products. 

The idea is to look at how outside influences might impact your operations from the following perspectives: best-case scenario, worst-case scenario, and reasonable-case scenario.

These scenarios help you to figure out the best way to respond to each. Determine which would be the most likely scenario and determine how you will address it. Then add it to your strategic plan.

Organic model

This model is not linear or structured like the other models. Its focus is on your company’s shared vision and values instead of plans and processes. The idea is that a company’s vision is achieved more organically when teams are able to openly and continuously discuss what steps to take. This requires a clear understanding of the vision, frequent and consistent communication, and dialogue among various stakeholders.

The model might include the following three basic steps:

• Clarify shared vision and values.
• Based on shared values, determine the actions and responsibilities for each person so they can work toward the vision.
• Stakeholders report the results of the action plans.

The organic model can work in large organizations that can afford to take a long time to achieve their vision and who can work well in a less structured environment. 

Real-time model

This model is fluid and designed for organizations that need to react quickly to a rapidly changing work environment. Long-term, detailed plans quickly become irrelevant because of rapid changes.

Real-time strategic planning involves the following:

• Organizational strategy: Define your mission and vision, understand your competitors, and know what the current market trends are.
• Programmatic strategy: Research external environments, list opportunities and threats, and brainstorm the best ways to approach each.
• Operational strategy: Analyze internal processes, resources, and systems. Develop a strategy that addresses internal strengths and weaknesses.

Inspirational model

This model is designed to inspire your people to energize them as they work toward goals. People come together to discuss an inspirational vision for your company. Then, participants are encouraged to brainstorm far-reaching, exciting goals to realize your company vision. 

The inspirational model works well for organizations looking to lift the spirits of its staff or quickly produce a plan.

Types of strategic planning frameworks

Without a strategic framework, you risk inconsistent messaging that can confuse customers and stakeholders. If your message and purpose are not completely understood, you can alienate stakeholders and lose employee motivation.

Here are some of the different types of strategic planning frameworks that you can use:

Balanced scorecards: Works as a strategic planning and management system. The balanced scorecard helps companies to align daily tasks with long-term strategy, communicate progress, set priorities, monitor progress, and measure success.

Strategy mapping: Provides a visual document to communicate your strategic plan. A strategy map make it easy to show relationships among various takes and objectives.

Porter’s Five Forces: Helps you to assess how competitive the market is. Porter’s Five Forces focuses on your company’s ability to enter a market, similar products customers can buy instead of yours, buyer power, supplier power, and the effect a competitor’s change in strategy would have on your company.

SWOT analysis: With this strategic planning framework, you analyze your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

PEST/PESTLE analysis: This framework looks at a business environment to see if there are any factors that could impact your organization’s health. PEST analysis includes political, economic, sociocultural, and technological factors.

Ansoff matrix: This strategic planning framework analyzes four potential opportunities for growth: market penetration, product development, market development, and diversification. Try the Ansoff matrix when seeking out new opportunities.

Objectives and key results ( OKRs ): In The objectives refer to what you want to achieve. The key results indicate how you’ll measure your progress toward your objectives.

Blue Ocean Strategy: With this framework, your company creates demand for products in an uncontested market space. You focus on differentiating your product from the competition rather than trying to beat them.

Value, Rarity, Imitability, and Organization (VRIO): This strategic planning framework answers questions concerning your product’s value, the amount of competition in your market, how easily your product can be imitated, and how well-organized your company is.

Hoshin Kanri: This framework is used to align goals with tasks, keeping everything coordinated and ensuring that everybody is working toward the same end result.

If strategic planning models and frameworks seem similar, it’s because they are. While strategic planning models outline the high-level structure of your plan, the strategic framework describes the design concepts and the plan’s details. 

It doesn’t matter which model and framework you choose to use. You can even combine aspects of several models or frameworks to meet your needs. The important thing to remember is that strategic models and frameworks are vital to creating and communicating a clear strategic plan that will keep your company relevant and competitive.

See how Lucidchart can help you through the strategic planning process, especially when it comes time to take action.

About Lucidchart

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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How To Write A Strategic Plan That Gets Results + Examples

Are you feeling overwhelmed with the thought of writing a strategic plan for your business? Do you want to create a plan that will help you move your team forward with inspired alignment and disciplined execution? You're not alone.

Gone are the days of rigid, 5- or 10-year planning cycles that do not leave room for flexibility and innovation. To stay ahead of the curve, you need a dynamic and execution-ready strategic plan that can guide your business through the ever-evolving landscape.

At Cascade, we understand that writing a strategic plan can be dreadful, especially in today's unpredictable environment. That's why we've developed a simple model that can help you create a clear, actionable plan to achieve your organization's goals. With our tested and proven strategic planning template , you can write a strategic plan that is both adaptable and effective .

Whether you're a seasoned strategy professional or a fresh strategy planner, this guide will walk you through the process step-by-step on how to write a strategic plan. By the end, you'll have a comprehensive, easy-to-follow strategic plan that will help you align your organization on the path to success.

Follow this guide step-by-step or skip to the part you’re most interested in: 

• Pre-Planning Phase: Build The Foundation

Cascade Model For Strategic Planning: What You Need To Know

• Key Elements of a Strategic Plan

How To Write A Strategic Plan In 6 Simple Steps

3 strategic plan examples to get you started, how to achieve organizational alignment with your strategic plan.

• Quick Overview of Key Steps In Writing A Strategic Plan

Create An Execution-Ready Strategic Plan With Cascade 🚀

*Editor’s note: This article is part of our ‘How to create a Strategy’ collection. At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to each piece within this collection so you can dig deeper into each element of an effective strategic plan and more related resources to master strategy execution.

Pre-Planning Phase: Build The Foundation 

Before we dive into writing a strategic plan, it's essential to know the basics you should cover before the planning phase. The pre-planning phase is where you'll begin to gather the data and strategic insights necessary to create an effective strategic plan.

1. Run a strategic planning workshop

The first step is to run a strategic planning workshop with your team. Get your team in the room, get their data, and gather their insights. By running this workshop, you'll foster collaboration and bring fresh perspectives to the table. And that’s not all. 

The process of co-creating and collaborating to put that plan together with stakeholders is one of the most critical factors in strategy execution . According to McKinsey’s research , initiatives in which employees contribute to development are 3.4 times more likely to be successful. They feel like the plan is a result of their efforts, and they feel ownership of it, so they're more likely to execute it. 

💡 Tip: Use strategy frameworks to structure your strategy development sessions, such as GAP analysis , SWOT analysis , Porter’s Five Forces , Ansoff matrix , McKinsey 7S model , or GE matrix . You can even apply the risk matrix that will help you align and decide on key strategic priorities.

2. Choose your strategic planning model

Before creating your strategic plan, you need to decide which structure you will use. There are hundreds of ways to structure a strategic plan. You’ve likely heard of famous strategic models such as OKRs and the Balanced Scorecard .

But beyond the well-known ones, there's also a myriad of other strategic planning models ranging from the extremely simple to the absurdly complex.

Many strategic models work reasonably well on paper, but in reality, they don't show you how to write a strategic plan that fits your organization's needs.

Here are some common weaknesses most popular strategic models have:

• They're too complicated. People get lost in terminology rather than focus on execution.
• They don’t scale. They work well for small organizations but fail when you try to extend them across multiple teams.
• They're too rigid. They force people to add layers for the sake of adding layers.
• They're neither tangible nor measurable. They’re great at stating outcomes but lousy at helping you measure success.
• They're not adaptable. As we saw in the last years, the business environment can change quickly. Your model needs to be able to work in your current situation and adapt to changing economic landscapes.

Our goal in this article is to give you a simpler, more effective way to write a strategic plan. This is a tested and proven strategic planning model that has been refined over years of working with +20,000 teams around the world. We call it the Cascade Strategy Model.

This approach has proven to be more effective than any other model we have tried when it comes to executing and implementing the strategy .

It’s easy to use and it works for small businesses, fast-growing startups, as well as multinationals trying to figure out how to write a fail-proof strategic plan.

We’ve created a simple diagram below to illustrate what a strategic plan following the Cascade Model will look like when it's completed:

Rather than a traditional roadmap , imagine your strategy as a flowchart. Each row is a mandatory step before moving on to the next.

We call our platform  Cascade for a reason: strategy must cascade throughout an organization along with values, focus areas, and objectives.

Above all, the Cascade Model is intended to be execution-ready —in other words, it has been proven to deliver success far beyond strategic planning. It adds to a successful strategic management process.Key elements of a Strategic Plan

Key Elements Of A Strategic Plan

The key elements of a strategic plan include: 

• Vision : Where do you want to get to? 
• Values : How will you behave on the journey? 
• Focus Areas : What are going to be your strategic priorities? 
• Strategic objectives : What do you want to achieve? 
• Actions and projects : How are you going to achieve the objectives? 
• KPIs : How will you measure success?

In this part of the article, we will give you an overview of each element within the Cascade Model. You can follow this step-by-step process in a spreadsheet , or sign up to get instant access to a free Cascade strategic planning template and follow along as we cover the key elements of an effective strategic plan.

Your vision statement is your organization's anchor - it defines where you want to get to and is the executive summary of your organization's purpose. Without it, your strategic plan is like a boat without a rudder, at the mercy of strong winds and currents like Covid and global supply chain disruptions.

A good vision statement can help funnel your strategy towards long-term goals that matter the most to your organization, and everything you write in your plan from this point on will help you get closer to achieving your vision.

Trying to do too much at once is a surefire way to sink your strategic plan. By creating a clear and inspiring vision statement , you can avoid this trap and provide guidance and inspiration for your team. A great vision statement might even help attract talent and investment into your organization.

For example, a bike manufacturing company might have a vision statement like, “To be the premier bike manufacturer in the Pacific Northwest.” This statement clearly articulates the organization's goals and is a powerful motivator for the team.

In short, don't start your strategic plan without a clear vision statement. It will keep your organization focused and help you navigate toward success.

📚 Recommended read: How to Write a Vision Statement (With Examples, Tips, and Formulas)

Values are the enablers of your vision statement —they represent how your organization will behave as you work towards your strategic goals. Unfortunately, many companies throw around meaningless words just for the purpose of PR, leading to a loss of credibility.

To avoid this, make sure to integrate your organization’s core values into everyday operations and interactions. In today's highly-competitive world, it's crucial to remain steadfast in your values and cultivate an organizational culture that's transparent and trustworthy.

Companies with the best company cultures consistently outperform competitors and their average market by up to 115.6%, as reported by Glassdoor . 

For example, a bike manufacturing company might have core values like:

• Accountability

These values reflect the organization's desire to become the leading bike manufacturer, while still being accountable to employees, customers, and shareholders.

👉 Here’s how to add vision and values to your strategic plan in Cascade: 

After you sign up and invite your team members to collaborate on the plan, navigate to Plans and Teams > Teams page, and add the vision, mission and values. This will help you to ensure that the company’s vision, mission statement, and values are always at top of mind for everyone.

📚When you're ready to start creating some company values, check out our guide, How To Create Company Values .

3. Focus Areas

Your focus areas are the strategic priorities that will keep your team on track and working toward the company’s mission and vision. They represent the high-level areas that you need to focus on to achieve desired business outcomes.

In fact, companies with clearly defined priorities are more likely to achieve their objectives. According to a case study by the Harvard Business Review , teams that focus on a small number of key initiatives are more likely to succeed than those that try to do too much. 

That’s also something that we usually recommend to our customers when they set up their strategic plan in Cascade. Rather than spreading your resources too thin over multiple focus areas, prioritize three to five. 

Following our manufacturing example above, some good focus areas include:

• Aggressive growth
• Producing the nation's best bikes
• Becoming a modern manufacturer
• Becoming a top place to work

Your focus areas should be tighter in scope than your vision statement, but broader than specific goals, time frames, or metrics. 

By defining your focus areas, you'll give your teams a guardrail to work within, which can help inspire innovation and creative problem-solving. 

With a clear set of focus areas, your team will be better able to prioritize their work and stay focused on the most important things, which will ultimately lead to better business results.

👉Here’s how you can set focus areas in Cascade: 

In Cascade, you can add focus areas while creating or importing an existing strategic plan from a spreadsheet. With Cascade’s Focus Area deep-dive functionality , you will be able to: 

• Review the health of your focus areas in one place.
• Get a breakdown by plans, budgets, resources, and people behind each strategic priority. 
• See something at-risk? Drill down into each piece of work regardless of how many plans it's a part of.

📚 Recommended read: Strategic Focus Areas: How to create them + Examples

4. Strategic Objectives

The importance of setting clear and specific objectives for your strategic plan cannot be overstated. 

Strategic objectives are the specific and measurable outcomes you want to achieve . While they should align with your focus areas, they should be more detailed and have a clear deadline. 

According to the 2022 State of High Performing Teams report , there is a strong correlation between goals and success not only at the individual and team level but also at the organizational level. Here’s what they found: 

• Employees who are unaware of their company's goals are over three times more likely to work at a company that is experiencing a decline in revenue than employees who are aware of the goals. 
• Companies with shrinking revenues are almost twice as likely to have employees with unclear work expectations. 

Jumping straight into actions without defining clear objectives is a common mistake that can lead to missed opportunities or misalignment between strategy and execution.

To avoid this pitfall, we recommend you add between three and six objectives to each focus area .

It's here that we need to start being a bit more specific for the first time in your strategic planning process . Let's take a look at an example of a well-written strategic objective:

• Continue top-line growth that outpaces the industry by 31st Dec 2023.

This is too specific to be a focus area. While it's still very high level, it indicates what the company wants to accomplish and includes a clear deadline. Both these aspects are critical to a good strategic objective.

Your strategic objectives are the heart and soul of your plan, and you need to ensure they are well-crafted. So, take the time to create well-planned objectives that will help you achieve your vision and lead your organization to success. 

👉Here’s how you can set objectives in Cascade: 

Adding objectives in Cascade is intuitive, straightforward, and accessible from almost anywhere in the workspace. With one click, you’ll open the objective sidebar and fill out the details. These can include a timeline, the objective’s owner, collaborators, and how your objective will be measured (success criteria).

📚 Recommended read: What are Strategic Objectives? How to write them + Examples

5. Actions and projects

Once you’ve defined your strategic objectives, the next step is to identify the specific strategic initiatives or projects that will help you achieve those objectives . They are short-term goals or actionable steps you or your team members will take to accomplish objectives. They should leverage the company’s resources and core competencies. 

Effective projects and actions in your strategic plan should: 

• Be extremely specific. 
• Contain a deadline.
• Have an owner.
• Align with at least one of your strategic objectives.
• Provide clarity on how you or your team will achieve the strategic objective.

Let's take a look at an example of a well-written project continuing with our bike manufacturing company using the strategic objective from above:

Strategic objective: Continue top-line growth that outpaces the industry by 31st Dec 2023.

Project: Expand into the fixed gear market by 31st December 2023.

This is more specific than the objective it links to, and it details what you will do to achieve the objective.

Another common problem area for strategic plans is that they never quite get down to the detail of what you're going to do.

It's easier to state "we need to grow our business," but without concrete projects and initiatives, those plans will sit forever within their PowerPoint templates, never to see the light of day after their initial creation.

Actions and projects are where the rubber meets the road. They connect the organizational strategic goals with the actual capabilities of your people and the resources at their disposal. Defining projects is a vital reality check every strategic plan needs.

👉Here’s how you create actions and projects in Cascade: 

From the Objective sidebar, you can choose to add a project or action under your chosen objective. In the following steps, you can assign an owner and timeline to each action or project.

Plus, in Cascade, you can track the progress of each project or action in four different ways. You can do it manually, via milestones, checklists, or automatically by integrating with Jira and 1000+ other available integrations .  

📚 Recommended read: How to create effective projects

Measuring progress towards strategic objectives is essential to effective strategic control and business success. That's where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in. KPIs are measurable values that track progress toward achieving key business objectives . They keep you on track and help you stay focused on the goals you set for your organization.

To get the most out of your KPIs, make sure you link them to a specific goal or objective. In this way, you'll avoid creating KPIs that don't contribute to your objectives and distract you from focusing on what matters. 

Ideally, you will add both leading and lagging KPIs to each objective so you can get a more balanced view of how well you're progressing. Leading KPIs can indicate future performance while lagging KPIs show how well you’ve done in the past. Both types of KPIs are critical for operational planning and keeping your business on track.

Think of KPIs as a form of signpost in your organization. They provide critical insights that inform business leaders of their organization’s progress toward key business objectives. Plus, they can help you identify opportunities faster and capitalize on flexibility. 

👉Here’s how you can set and track KPIs in Cascade: 

In Cascade , you can add measures while creating your objectives or add them afterward. Open the Objective sidebar and add your chosen measure. 

When you create your Measure, you can choose how to track it. Using Cascade, you can track it manually or automatically. You can automate tracking via 1000+ integrations , including Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets. In this way, you can save time and ensure that your team has up-to-date information for faster and more confident decision-making.

📚 Recommended reads:

• 10 Popular KPI Software Tools To Connect & Visualize Your Data (2023 Guide)
• ‍ How To Track KPIs To Hit Your Business Goals

Corporate Strategic Plan 

Following the steps outlined above, you should end up with a strategic plan that looks something like this:

This is a preview of a corporate strategic plan template that is pre-filled with examples. Here you can use the template for free and begin filling it out to align with your organization's needs. Plus, it’s suitable for organizations of all sizes and any industry. 

Once you fill in the template, you can also switch to the timeline view. You’ll get a complete overview of how the different parts of your plan are distributed across the roadmap in a Gantt chart view.

This template will help you create a structured approach to the strategic planning process, focus on key strategic priorities, and drive accountability to achieve necessary business outcomes. 

👉 Get your free corporate strategic plan template here.

Coca-Cola Strategic Plan 

Need a bit of extra inspiration to start writing your organization’s strategic plan? Check out this strategic plan example, inspired by Coca-Cola’s business plan: 

This template is pre-filled with Coca-Cola’s examples so you can inspire your strategic success on one of the most iconic brands on the planet. 

👉 Grab your free example of a Coca-Cola strategic plan here.

The Ramsay Health Care expansion strategy

Ramsay Health Care is a multinational healthcare provider with a strong presence in Australia, Europe, and Asia.

Almost all of its growth was organic and strategic. The company founded its headquarters in Sydney, Australia, but in the 21st century, it decided to expand globally through a primary strategy of making brownfield investments and acquisitions in key locations.

Ramsay's strategy was simple yet clever. By becoming a majority shareholder of the biggest local players, the company expanded organically in each region by leveraging and expanding their expertise.

Over the last two decades, Ramsay's global network has grown to 460 locations across 10 countries with over $13 billion in annual revenue.

📚 Recommended read: Strategy study: The Ramsay Health Care Growth Study

✨ Bonus resource: We've created a list of the most popular and free strategic plan templates in our library that will help you build a strategic plan based on the Cascade model explained in this article. You can use these templates to create a plan on a corporate, business unit, or team level.

We highlighted before that other strategic models often fail to scale strategic plans and goals scales across multiple teams and organizational levels. 

In an ideal world, you want to have a maximum of two layers of detail underneath each of your focus areas. This means you'll have a focus area, followed by a layer of objectives. Underneath the objectives, you'll have a layer of actions, projects, and KPIs.

If you have a single team that’s responsible for the strategy execution, this works well. However, how do you implement a strategy across multiple and cross-functional teams? And why is it important? 

According to LSA research of 410 companies across 8 industries, highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable. And this is what Cascade can help you achieve. 

To achieve achieve organization-wide alignment with your strategic plan and impact the bottom line, there are two ways to approach it in Casade: through contributing objectives or shared objectives .

1. Contributing objectives

This approach involves adding contributing objectives that link to your main strategic objectives, like this:

For each contributing objective, you simply repeat the Objective → Action/Project → KPI structure as follows:

Here's how you can create contributing objectives in Cascade: 

Option A: Create contributing objectives within the same plan 

This means creating multiple contributing objectives within the same strategic plan that contribute to the main objective. 

However, be aware that if you have a lot of layers, your strategic plan can become cluttered, and people might have difficulty understanding how their daily efforts contribute to the strategic plan at the top level. 

For example, the people responsible for managing contributing objectives at the bottom of the plan ( functional / operational level ) will lose visibility on how are their objectives linked to the main focus areas and objectives (at a corporate / business level ). 

This approach is best suited to smaller organizations that only need to add a few layers of objectives to their plan.

Option B: Create contributing objectives from multiple plans linking to the main objective

This approach creates a network of aligned strategic plans within your organization. Each plan contains a set of focus areas and one single layer of objectives, each with its own set of projects, actions, and KPIs. This concept looks like this:

This example illustrates an objective that is a main objective in the IT strategic plan , but also contributes to the main strategic plan's objective.

For example, let’s say that your main business objective is to improve customer satisfaction by reducing product delivery time by 25% in the next quarter. This objective requires multiple operational teams within your organization to work together to achieve a shared objective. 

Each team will create its own objective in its plan to contribute to the main objective: 

• Logistics team: Reduce the shipment preparation time by 30%
• IT team: Implement new technology to reduce manual handling in the warehouse
• Production team: Increase production output by hour for 5%   

Here’s how this example would look like within Cascade platform:

Although each contributing objective was originally created in its own plan, you can see how each contributing objective relates to the main strategic objective and its status in real-time.

2. Shared objectives

In Cascade, shared objectives are the same objectives shared across different strategic plans.

For example, you can have an objective that is “Achieve sustainable operations”. This objective can be part of the Corporate Strategy Plan, but also part of the Operations Plan , Supply Chain Plan , Production Plan, etc. In short, this objective becomes a shared objective between multiple teams and strategic plan. 

This approach helps you to:

• Cascade your business strategy as deep as you want across a near-infinite number of people while maintaining strategic alignment throughout your organization .
• Create transparency and a much higher level of engagement in the strategy throughout your organization since objective owners are able to identify how their shared efforts contribute to the success of the main business objectives.

The more shared objectives you have across your organization, the more your teams will be aligned with the overarching business strategy. This is what we call " alignment health ”. 

Here’s how you can see the shared objectives in the alignment map and analyze alignment health within Cascade:

You get a snapshot of how is your corporate strategic plan aligned with sub-plans from different business units or departments and the status of shared objectives. This helps you quickly identify misaligned initiatives and act before it’s too late.  Plus, cross-functional teams have better visibility of how their efforts contribute to shared objectives. 

So whether you choose contributing objectives or shared objectives, Cascade has the tools and features to help you achieve organization-wide alignment and boost your bottom line.

Quick Overview Of Key Steps In Writing A Strategic Plan

Here’s a quick infographic to help you remember how everything connects and why each element is critical to creating an effective strategic plan:

This simple answer to how to write a strategic plan avoids confusing jargon and has elements that the whole organization can both get behind and understand. 

💡Tip: Save this image or bookmark this article for your next strategic planning session.

If you're struggling to write an execution-ready strategic plan, the Cascade model is the solution you've been looking for. With its clear, easy-to-understand terminology, and simple linkages between objectives, projects, and KPIs, you can create a plan that's both scalable and flexible.

But why is a flexible and execution-ready strategic plan so important? It's simple: without a clear and actionable plan, you'll never be able to achieve your business objectives. By using the Cascade Strategic Planning Model, you'll be able to create a plan that's both tangible and measurable, with KPIs that help you track progress towards your goals.

However, the real value of the Cascade framework lies in its flexibility . By creating links between main business objectives and your teams’ objectives, you can easily scale your plan without losing focus. Plus, the model's structure of linked layers means that you can always adjust your strategy in response to new challenges or opportunities and keep everyone on the same page. 

So if you want to achieve results with your strategic plan, start using Cascade today. With its unique combination of flexibility and focus, it's the perfect tool for any organization looking to master strategy execution and succeed in today's fast-paced business world. 

Want to see Cascade in action? Get started for free or book a 1:1 demo with Cascade’s in-house strategy expert.

This article is part one of our mini-series "How to Write a Strategic Plan". This first article will give you a solid strategy model for your plan and get the strategic thinking going.

Think of it as the foundation for your new strategy. Subsequent parts of the series will show you how to create the content for your strategic plan.

Articles in our How to Write a Strategic Plan series

• How To Write A Strategic Plan: The Cascade Model (This article)
• How to Write a Good Vision Statement
• How To Create Company Values
• Creating Strategic Focus Areas
• How To Write Strategic Objective
• How To Create Effective Projects
• How To Write KPIs + Ultimate Guide To Strategic Planning

More resources on strategic planning and strategy execution: 

• 6 Steps to Successful Strategy Execution
• 4-Step Strategy Reporting Process (With Template)
• Annual Planning: Plan Like a Pro In 5 Steps (+ Template) 
• 18 Free Strategic Plan Templates (Excel & Cascade) 2023
• The Right Way To Set Team Goals
• 23 Best Strategy Tools For Your Organization in 2023

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Viva Goals Vs. Cascade: Goal Management Vs. Strategy Execution

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• What is strategic planning? A 5-step gu ...

What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. The strategic planning process informs your organization’s decisions, growth, and goals.

Strategic planning helps you clearly define your company’s long-term objectives—and maps how your short-term goals and work will help you achieve them. This, in turn, gives you a clear sense of where your organization is going and allows you to ensure your teams are working on projects that make the most impact. Think of it this way—if your goals and objectives are your destination on a map, your strategic plan is your navigation system.

In this article, we walk you through the 5-step strategic planning process and show you how to get started developing your own strategic plan.

How to build an organizational strategy

Get our free ebook and learn how to bridge the gap between mission, strategic goals, and work at your organization.

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a business process that helps you define and share the direction your company will take in the next three to five years. During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization’s mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives. The product of the planning cycle is a strategic plan, which is shared throughout the company.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is the end result of the strategic planning process. At its most basic, it’s a tool used to define your organization’s goals and what actions you’ll take to achieve them.

Typically, your strategic plan should include: 

Your company’s mission statement

Your organizational goals, including your long-term goals and short-term, yearly objectives

Any plan of action, tactics, or approaches you plan to take to meet those goals

What are the benefits of strategic planning?

Strategic planning can help with goal setting and decision-making by allowing you to map out how your company will move toward your organization’s vision and mission statements in the next three to five years. Let’s circle back to our map metaphor. If you think of your company trajectory as a line on a map, a strategic plan can help you better quantify how you’ll get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be in a few years).

When you create and share a clear strategic plan with your team, you can:

Build a strong organizational culture by clearly defining and aligning on your organization’s mission, vision, and goals.

Align everyone around a shared purpose and ensure all departments and teams are working toward a common objective.

Proactively set objectives to help you get where you want to go and achieve desired outcomes.

Promote a long-term vision for your company rather than focusing primarily on short-term gains.

Ensure resources are allocated around the most high-impact priorities.

Define long-term goals and set shorter-term goals to support them.

Assess your current situation and identify any opportunities—or threats—allowing your organization to mitigate potential risks.

Create a proactive business culture that enables your organization to respond more swiftly to emerging market changes and opportunities.

What are the 5 steps in strategic planning?

The strategic planning process involves a structured methodology that guides the organization from vision to implementation. The strategic planning process starts with assembling a small, dedicated team of key strategic planners—typically five to 10 members—who will form the strategic planning, or management, committee. This team is responsible for gathering crucial information, guiding the development of the plan, and overseeing strategy execution.

Once you’ve established your management committee, you can get to work on the planning process. 

Step 1: Assess your current business strategy and business environment

Before you can define where you’re going, you first need to define where you are. Understanding the external environment, including market trends and competitive landscape, is crucial in the initial assessment phase of strategic planning.

To do this, your management committee should collect a variety of information from additional stakeholders, like employees and customers. In particular, plan to gather:

Relevant industry and market data to inform any market opportunities, as well as any potential upcoming threats in the near future.

Customer insights to understand what your customers want from your company—like product improvements or additional services.

Employee feedback that needs to be addressed—whether about the product, business practices, or the day-to-day company culture.

Consider different types of strategic planning tools and analytical techniques to gather this information, such as:

A balanced scorecard to help you evaluate four major elements of a business: learning and growth, business processes, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

A SWOT analysis to help you assess both current and future potential for the business (you’ll return to this analysis periodically during the strategic planning process). 

To fill out each letter in the SWOT acronym, your management committee will answer a series of questions:

What does your organization currently do well?

What separates you from your competitors?

What are your most valuable internal resources?

What tangible assets do you have?

What is your biggest strength? 

Weaknesses:

What does your organization do poorly?

What do you currently lack (whether that’s a product, resource, or process)?

What do your competitors do better than you?

What, if any, limitations are holding your organization back?

What processes or products need improvement? 

Opportunities:

What opportunities does your organization have?

How can you leverage your unique company strengths?

Are there any trends that you can take advantage of?

How can you capitalize on marketing or press opportunities?

Is there an emerging need for your product or service? 

What emerging competitors should you keep an eye on?

Are there any weaknesses that expose your organization to risk?

Have you or could you experience negative press that could reduce market share?

Is there a chance of changing customer attitudes towards your company? 

Step 2: Identify your company’s goals and objectives

To begin strategy development, take into account your current position, which is where you are now. Then, draw inspiration from your vision, mission, and current position to identify and define your goals—these are your final destination. 

To develop your strategy, you’re essentially pulling out your compass and asking, “Where are we going next?” “What’s the ideal future state of this company?” This can help you figure out which path you need to take to get there.

During this phase of the planning process, take inspiration from important company documents, such as:

Your mission statement, to understand how you can continue moving towards your organization’s core purpose.

Your vision statement, to clarify how your strategic plan fits into your long-term vision.

Your company values, to guide you towards what matters most towards your company.

Your competitive advantages, to understand what unique benefit you offer to the market.

Your long-term goals, to track where you want to be in five or 10 years.

Your financial forecast and projection, to understand where you expect your financials to be in the next three years, what your expected cash flow is, and what new opportunities you will likely be able to invest in.

Step 3: Develop your strategic plan and determine performance metrics

Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to put pen to paper. Take your current business position and strategy into account, as well as your organization’s goals and objectives, and build out a strategic plan for the next three to five years. Keep in mind that even though you’re creating a long-term plan, parts of your plan should be created or revisited as the quarters and years go on.

As you build your strategic plan, you should define:

Company priorities for the next three to five years, based on your SWOT analysis and strategy.

Yearly objectives for the first year. You don’t need to define your objectives for every year of the strategic plan. As the years go on, create new yearly objectives that connect back to your overall strategic goals . 

Related key results and KPIs. Some of these should be set by the management committee, and some should be set by specific teams that are closer to the work. Make sure your key results and KPIs are measurable and actionable. These KPIs will help you track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

Budget for the next year or few years. This should be based on your financial forecast as well as your direction. Do you need to spend aggressively to develop your product? Build your team? Make a dent with marketing? Clarify your most important initiatives and how you’ll budget for those.

A high-level project roadmap . A project roadmap is a tool in project management that helps you visualize the timeline of a complex initiative, but you can also create a very high-level project roadmap for your strategic plan. Outline what you expect to be working on in certain quarters or years to make the plan more actionable and understandable.

Step 4: Implement and share your plan

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Strategy implementation involves clear communication across your entire organization to make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to measure the plan’s success. 

Make sure your team (especially senior leadership) has access to the strategic plan, so they can understand how their work contributes to company priorities and the overall strategy map. We recommend sharing your plan in the same tool you use to manage and track work, so you can more easily connect high-level objectives to daily work. If you don’t already, consider using a work management platform .  

A few tips to make sure your plan will be executed without a hitch: 

Communicate clearly to your entire organization throughout the implementation process, to ensure all team members understand the strategic plan and how to implement it effectively. 

Define what “success” looks like by mapping your strategic plan to key performance indicators.

Ensure that the actions outlined in the strategic plan are integrated into the daily operations of the organization, so that every team member's daily activities are aligned with the broader strategic objectives.

Utilize tools and software—like a work management platform—that can aid in implementing and tracking the progress of your plan.

Regularly monitor and share the progress of the strategic plan with the entire organization, to keep everyone informed and reinforce the importance of the plan.

Establish regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your strategic plan and make adjustments as needed. 

Step 5: Revise and restructure as needed

Once you’ve created and implemented your new strategic framework, the final step of the planning process is to monitor and manage your plan.

Remember, your strategic plan isn’t set in stone. You’ll need to revisit and update the plan if your company changes directions or makes new investments. As new market opportunities and threats come up, you’ll likely want to tweak your strategic plan. Make sure to review your plan regularly—meaning quarterly and annually—to ensure it’s still aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.

Keep in mind that your plan won’t last forever, even if you do update it frequently. A successful strategic plan evolves with your company’s long-term goals. When you’ve achieved most of your strategic goals, or if your strategy has evolved significantly since you first made your plan, it might be time to create a new one.

Build a smarter strategic plan with a work management platform

To turn your company strategy into a plan—and ultimately, impact—make sure you’re proactively connecting company objectives to daily work. When you can clarify this connection, you’re giving your team members the context they need to get their best work done. 

A work management platform plays a pivotal role in this process. It acts as a central hub for your strategic plan, ensuring that every task and project is directly tied to your broader company goals. This alignment is crucial for visibility and coordination, allowing team members to see how their individual efforts contribute to the company’s success. 

By leveraging such a platform, you not only streamline workflow and enhance team productivity but also align every action with your strategic objectives—allowing teams to drive greater impact and helping your company move toward goals more effectively. 

Strategic planning FAQs

Still have questions about strategic planning? We have answers.

Why do I need a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is one of many tools you can use to plan and hit your goals. It helps map out strategic objectives and growth metrics that will help your company be successful.

When should I create a strategic plan?

You should aim to create a strategic plan every three to five years, depending on your organization’s growth speed.

Since the point of a strategic plan is to map out your long-term goals and how you’ll get there, you should create a strategic plan when you’ve met most or all of them. You should also create a strategic plan any time you’re going to make a large pivot in your organization’s mission or enter new markets. 

What is a strategic planning template?

A strategic planning template is a tool organizations can use to map out their strategic plan and track progress. Typically, a strategic planning template houses all the components needed to build out a strategic plan, including your company’s vision and mission statements, information from any competitive analyses or SWOT assessments, and relevant KPIs.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. business plan?

A business plan can help you document your strategy as you’re getting started so every team member is on the same page about your core business priorities and goals. This tool can help you document and share your strategy with key investors or stakeholders as you get your business up and running.

You should create a business plan when you’re: 

Just starting your business

Significantly restructuring your business

If your business is already established, you should create a strategic plan instead of a business plan. Even if you’re working at a relatively young company, your strategic plan can build on your business plan to help you move in the right direction. During the strategic planning process, you’ll draw from a lot of the fundamental business elements you built early on to establish your strategy for the next three to five years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. mission and vision statements?

Your strategic plan, mission statement, and vision statements are all closely connected. In fact, during the strategic planning process, you will take inspiration from your mission and vision statements in order to build out your strategic plan.

Simply put: 

A mission statement summarizes your company’s purpose.

A vision statement broadly explains how you’ll reach your company’s purpose.

A strategic plan pulls in inspiration from your mission and vision statements and outlines what actions you’re going to take to move in the right direction. 

For example, if your company produces pet safety equipment, here’s how your mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan might shake out:

Mission statement: “To ensure the safety of the world’s animals.” 

Vision statement: “To create pet safety and tracking products that are effortless to use.” 

Your strategic plan would outline the steps you’re going to take in the next few years to bring your company closer to your mission and vision. For example, you develop a new pet tracking smart collar or improve the microchipping experience for pet owners. 

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. company objectives?

Company objectives are broad goals. You should set these on a yearly or quarterly basis (if your organization moves quickly). These objectives give your team a clear sense of what you intend to accomplish for a set period of time. 

Your strategic plan is more forward-thinking than your company goals, and it should cover more than one year of work. Think of it this way: your company objectives will move the needle towards your overall strategy—but your strategic plan should be bigger than company objectives because it spans multiple years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a business case?

A business case is a document to help you pitch a significant investment or initiative for your company. When you create a business case, you’re outlining why this investment is a good idea, and how this large-scale project will positively impact the business. 

You might end up building business cases for things on your strategic plan’s roadmap—but your strategic plan should be bigger than that. This tool should encompass multiple years of your roadmap, across your entire company—not just one initiative.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a project plan?

A strategic plan is a company-wide, multi-year plan of what you want to accomplish in the next three to five years and how you plan to accomplish that. A project plan, on the other hand, outlines how you’re going to accomplish a specific project. This project could be one of many initiatives that contribute to a specific company objective which, in turn, is one of many objectives that contribute to your strategic plan. 

What’s the difference between strategic management vs. strategic planning?

A strategic plan is a tool to define where your organization wants to go and what actions you need to take to achieve those goals. Strategic planning is the process of creating a plan in order to hit your strategic objectives.

Strategic management includes the strategic planning process, but also goes beyond it. In addition to planning how you will achieve your big-picture goals, strategic management also helps you organize your resources and figure out the best action plans for success. 

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5 strategic planning models and when to use them

By Anabelle Zaluski

It’s often said that hindsight is 20/20. 

But in business, waiting for clarity to set in means missed opportunities and costly missteps. 

Strategic planning models offer foresight, facilitating goal achievement through proactive and informed decision-making. And they don’t just provide an action plan with a direct route. Carefully developed models also help you anticipate obstacles and align business objectives with daily operations. 

Using a strategic planning model template adds structure to the planning process, ensuring that you explore every potential avenue and account for each challenge. 

What’s a strategic planning model?

A strategic planning model is a structured approach organizations use to develop their short- and long-term strategy and guide decision-making. There are several strategic planning models to choose from, and companies select one based on their needs, culture, and the nature of their business.

The chosen model serves as a framework to align an organization's vision and goals with its resources and capabilities, helping leaders make more informed decisions. During the process, you identify, analyze, and plan for opportunities and risks. 

Here are some aspects of your business you can expect to uncover during the strategic planning process: 

Identify and anticipate challenges with proactive action plans

Develop efficiencies for daily operations

Align work with larger business objectives and your mission statement

Measure business strategy against the company's vision statement

Create a roadmap to unite strategic management across departments

Set milestones to track consistent progress

Why do you need a strategic planning model? 

Your business has goals, and a well-defined, strategic plan could be the difference between reaching them or not. 

Whether you’re part of a brand-new startup with a handful of employees or a seasoned multinational company, strategy sharpens focus and unifies team efforts. The absence of a strategic plan leaves you vulnerable to unproductive misalignment, market loss, and operational stagnation. 

Here are three reasons to build a strategic planning model: 

Unifies vision — a strategic planning model carves a transparent guide for every team member to follow. When departments work in unison on a singular vision, their cumulative efforts push the business toward the overarching objective. Otherwise, disparate efforts can pull the organization in different directions, diluting energy and resources.

Empowers with insights — strategic planning activities analyze an organization’s strengths and weaknesses , allowing you to assess risks and opportunities. Likewise, it can help position the business within a larger market narrative, analyzing competition and potential strategies for differentiation. 

Builds resilience — markets change, necessity shifts business objectives, and opportunities unexpectedly appear. You can’t predict everything that’ll happen during a strategic planning model’s timeline, but foresight can help you work productively and act confidently when you arrive at a fork in the road. 

Strategic planning frameworks versus models

At first glance, strategic planning frameworks and models sound interchangeable. But a simple way to understand the difference is by imagining the construction of a building:

A strategic planning framework is your toolbox — you use a set of strategic planning tools during the initial planning stages of a business initiative. Like an architect or engineer who uses trade skills to create a cohesive vision, your team can employ different methods (like a PEST analysis or OKRs framework) to analyze your business situation and design an action plan. 

A strategic planning model is your blueprint — a model lays out a step-by-step process to bring the construction to life. Just like a construction crew turns to a detailed building plan, your organization follows your strategic planning model to chart the course and ensure decision-making and workflow align with your final goals. 

In the initial stages of the strategic planning process, you might employ several of the following strategic planning frameworks: 

SWOT analysis — “SWOT” stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and is a popular method for analyzing a business situation's positive and negative aspects. Use a SWOT analysis template to build a strategic plan that leverages strengths for growth and potential risks.

PEST/PESTLE analysis framework — a PEST analysis is a useful business forecasting tool. It focuses on external factors that bolster or block your business’s success. “PESTLE” stands for political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental, encouraging you to account for influences like taxes, social demographics, and communication barriers.

OKRs framework — an “OKR” is an objective and key result that establishes a set of business goals and priorities. Using Notion’s OKRs template or OKR template for small businesses , you can ensure the goals you establish are trackable and shareable for team members.

The Hoshin Kanri framework —  this strategic planning tool brings the entire organization on board. With a Hoshin Kanri framework, leadership builds company-wide objectives and communicates them to individual team members, ensuring everyone’s workflow aligns with overarching project or company goals.

VRIO framework — “VRIO” stands for value, rarity, imitability, and organization. You can use this strategic planning tool to analyze your resources and competitive advantage. 

Porter's five forces — Harvard researcher Michael Porter’s framework analyzes the potential performance of a product or service before it enters the market. Porter’s framework can help you measure your competitive advantage and mitigate risk against five threats, including new market players, bargaining powers of suppliers and consumers, and competitors and their products.

5 popular strategic planning models

Once you can confidently differentiate a PESTLE analysis from the Hoshin framework (and everything in between), you’re ready to move on to strategic planning models. Let’s examine five popular models to implement business strategy: 

1. Basic model 

A basic strategic planning model is a valuable tool for new organizations. It focuses on building a mission statement for your organization, summarizing the goals that will define and transform the business. Once you have a clear mission statement, the basic model allows you to break down goals into smaller tasks. 

Organization: A start-up organic juice bar

Mission statement: “To provide healthy, delicious, and environmentally-friendly beverage options to health-conscious consumers.”

Establish the brand as a leader in organic beverages

Promote sustainability and wellness

Attain consistent growth in revenue

Source high-quality, organic ingredients

Develop a sustainable and eco-friendly supply chain

Implement effective marketing strategies focusing on health benefits and environmental values

Monitor financial performance and adjust strategies as needed

2. Alignment model

This model focuses on aligning your business’s mission and resources, particularly your IT capabilities. It’s an ideal model for businesses that want to identify internal bottlenecks, optimize current resources to match their mission or analyze growth potential during business restructuring. 

Organization: A burgeoning tech firm specializing in developing AI solutions

Mission statement: “To innovate and deliver cutting-edge AI solutions that empower businesses and enhance user experiences.”

Alignment focus:

Ensure that IT capabilities and resources fully align with the mission to optimize innovation and development cycles

Identify and resolve any internal bottlenecks hampering the optimal usage of resources and capabilities

Strategies:

Conduct a thorough analysis of current IT capabilities and resources to identify areas of improvement and optimization

Develop and implement strategies to enhance IT capabilities, focusing on innovation and the development of unique AI solutions

Establish feedback loops to continually assess and refine alignment between IT capabilities and organizational mission

Regularly review and adjust IT resource allocation to match development needs

Engage in continuous learning and development initiatives to keep IT skills and knowledge up-to-date and aligned with industry advancements

Implement Agile methodologies to optimize development cycles and promote innovation

3. Balanced scorecard

A balanced scorecard integrates strategic planning with performance measurements. This model focuses your attention on financial metrics that track operational, customer, and developmental performance. Using the scorecard allows you to understand the most effective financial resources, measuring them against metrics like stakeholder performance, internal efficiencies, and organizational capacity. 

Organization: A healthcare management company striving to optimize its operations and services

Mission statement: “To deliver superior healthcare management services that optimize operational efficiency, enhance patient satisfaction, and maximize value for stakeholders.”

Balanced scorecard focus areas:

Financial metrics — use these to evaluate financial performance and investment in innovations to ensure sustained growth.

Customer metrics — employ this information to assess patient satisfaction, service quality, and relationship management.

Internal process metrics — leverage this data to examine operational efficiency, workflow optimization, and service delivery.

Learning and growth metrics — keep track of these to evaluate organizational development, employee competence, and information system efficiency.

Develop and implement comprehensive strategies that align operational processes with financial goals, customer needs, internal efficiencies, and organizational capacity

Continuously monitor and refine strategies based on balanced scorecard assessments to enhance performance across all domains

Regularly assess and adjust financial allocations to ensure operational efficiency

Implement customer feedback systems to understand and improve patient satisfaction and service quality

Foster a learning environment that encourages employee development and skill building

4. Issue-based model

An issue-based model builds on top of the basic model, a blueprint for businesses that are ready to create a more comprehensive strategic plan. Teams often use this model alongside a SWOT analysis, focusing on building strategies that prioritize the internal and external influences that impact your organization at large or a specific product or service offering. 

Organization: A manufacturer specializing in sustainable packaging solutions

Mission statement: “To pioneer eco-friendly packaging innovations that reduce environmental impact and drive sustainability in the packaging industry.”

Issue-based focus:

Internal issues — evaluate production processes, resource utilization, and workforce efficiency to address any gaps or inefficiencies.

External issues — assess market trends, customer preferences, and competitor strategies to identify opportunities and threats in the external environment.

Develop robust strategies addressing the internal and external issues, prioritizing areas with the most significant impact on organizational goals and objectives

Formulate action plans to leverage strengths and opportunities and mitigate weaknesses and threats

Implement sustainable practices and innovations in production processes to address internal inefficiencies and enhance environmental friendliness

Engage in market research and customer feedback to understand external influences and adjust product offerings and strategies accordingly

Monitor the effectiveness of the strategies you implement and refine them based on evolving internal and external conditions

5. Scenario model

Effective strategic thinking takes uncontrollable external influences into account. Scenario planning , for example, helps you identify external challenges to your business, like government policies or new technology. This model is useful for companies in volatile or rapidly evolving industries, allowing you to plan for hypothetical situations that require swift execution of crisis management plans to keep with the curve. 

Organization: A company specializing in renewable energy solutions, operating in a rapidly evolving and somewhat unpredictable market.

Mission statement: “To accelerate the global transition to sustainable energy through innovative solutions and advanced renewable technologies”

Scenario planning focus:

External challenges — regularly assess potential impacts of government policies, emerging technologies, market trends, and economic fluctuations to stay competitive.

Hypothetical situations — develop various scenarios representing possible future states of the industry and external environment to safeguard against change.

Formulate adaptable strategies and crisis management plans for each scenario to ensure organizational resilience and sustained growth regardless of external changes

Regularly review and update scenarios and associated strategies to reflect shifts in the industry landscape

Continuously monitor external influences and industry developments to identify new challenges and opportunities

Develop and refine contingency plans and execution strategies for each scenario to ensure swift and effective response to unforeseen changes

Foster an adaptive and proactive organizational culture to enhance agility and responsiveness in a volatile industry

Best practices for using strategic planning models

Choosing and implementing the right strategic planning model for your business requires careful consideration. Here are three tips to consider: 

Perform a thorough analysis — a single framework likely can’t provide all the answers you’re looking for. Take the time to analyze your company’s needs and current reality as carefully as possible. A comprehensive analysis during the initial planning stages will inform more straightforward and efficient strategic planning. 

Find what works for you — strategic planning models aren’t dogmatic. If one piece of the chosen planning tool isn’t realistic, swap it out. Think of the model you choose as a recipe for success and adjust the details when necessary. 

Stay consistent — goals aren’t achieved overnight. Set a timeframe to use the chosen model consistently. Patience will help you understand how it impacts your business, allowing you to make better decisions when you adjust your plans or want to implement a new model. 

Which model is right for you? 

All of the model templates we’ve chosen have something in common. Regardless of your objectives, a good model should have two basic components: 

A clear, templated structure for creating goals

Measurable performance structures that you can adapt to your resources 

To choose the most appropriate model, clearly identify your short-term goals and long-term objectives using different frameworks. Once you’ve defined your company’s mission, choose the model that best adapts to these goals and provides you with the right metrics to measure performance. 

Top-of-the-line tools and templates

Strategic planning is necessary to achieve your business goals efficiently and effectively. And with so many options, choosing the right templates is essential to turning ideas into reality. 

That’s where Notion comes in. Our database of tools and templates , like this comprehensive long-term project planning and execution template , can help you plan every aspect of your business from start to finish.

Keep reading

Tactical versus strategic planning: using both for initiative success

How to create and organize a KPI dashboard

Turning ideas into effective strategies with a NOISE analysis

Using a SOAR analysis to enhance your strategic planning

How to set strategic goals to envision and realize your objectives

Boost your business with these 5 SWOT analysis templates

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How to make a business plan

Table of Contents

How to make a good business plan: step-by-step guide.

A business plan is a strategic roadmap used to navigate the challenging journey of entrepreneurship. It's the foundation upon which you build a successful business.

A well-crafted business plan can help you define your vision, clarify your goals, and identify potential problems before they arise.

But where do you start? How do you create a business plan that sets you up for success?

This article will explore the step-by-step process of creating a comprehensive business plan.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a formal document that outlines a business's objectives, strategies, and operational procedures. It typically includes the following information about a company:

Products or services

Target market

Competitors

Marketing and sales strategies

Financial plan

Management team

A business plan serves as a roadmap for a company's success and provides a blueprint for its growth and development. It helps entrepreneurs and business owners organize their ideas, evaluate the feasibility, and identify potential challenges and opportunities.

As well as serving as a guide for business owners, a business plan can attract investors and secure funding. It demonstrates the company's understanding of the market, its ability to generate revenue and profits, and its strategy for managing risks and achieving success.

Business plan vs. business model canvas

A business plan may seem similar to a business model canvas, but each document serves a different purpose.

A business model canvas is a high-level overview that helps entrepreneurs and business owners quickly test and iterate their ideas. It is often a one-page document that briefly outlines the following:

Key partnerships

Key activities

Key propositions

Customer relationships

Customer segments

Key resources

Cost structure

Revenue streams

On the other hand, a Business Plan Template provides a more in-depth analysis of a company's strategy and operations. It is typically a lengthy document and requires significant time and effort to develop.

A business model shouldn’t replace a business plan, and vice versa. Business owners should lay the foundations and visually capture the most important information with a Business Model Canvas Template . Because this is a fast and efficient way to communicate a business idea, a business model canvas is a good starting point before developing a more comprehensive business plan.

A business plan can aim to secure funding from investors or lenders, while a business model canvas communicates a business idea to potential customers or partners.

Why is a business plan important?

A business plan is crucial for any entrepreneur or business owner wanting to increase their chances of success.

Here are some of the many benefits of having a thorough business plan.

Helps to define the business goals and objectives

A business plan encourages you to think critically about your goals and objectives. Doing so lets you clearly understand what you want to achieve and how you plan to get there.

A well-defined set of goals, objectives, and key results also provides a sense of direction and purpose, which helps keep business owners focused and motivated.

Guides decision-making

A business plan requires you to consider different scenarios and potential problems that may arise in your business. This awareness allows you to devise strategies to deal with these issues and avoid pitfalls.

With a clear plan, entrepreneurs can make informed decisions aligning with their overall business goals and objectives. This helps reduce the risk of making costly mistakes and ensures they make decisions with long-term success in mind.

Attracts investors and secures funding

Investors and lenders often require a business plan before considering investing in your business. A document that outlines the company's goals, objectives, and financial forecasts can help instill confidence in potential investors and lenders.

A well-written business plan demonstrates that you have thoroughly thought through your business idea and have a solid plan for success.

Identifies potential challenges and risks

A business plan requires entrepreneurs to consider potential challenges and risks that could impact their business. For example:

Is there enough demand for my product or service?

Will I have enough capital to start my business?

Is the market oversaturated with too many competitors?

What will happen if my marketing strategy is ineffective?

By identifying these potential challenges, entrepreneurs can develop strategies to mitigate risks and overcome challenges. This can reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes and ensure the business is well-positioned to take on any challenges.

Provides a basis for measuring success

A business plan serves as a framework for measuring success by providing clear goals and financial projections . Entrepreneurs can regularly refer to the original business plan as a benchmark to measure progress. By comparing the current business position to initial forecasts, business owners can answer questions such as:

Are we where we want to be at this point?

Did we achieve our goals?

If not, why not, and what do we need to do?

After assessing whether the business is meeting its objectives or falling short, business owners can adjust their strategies as needed.

How to make a business plan step by step

The steps below will guide you through the process of creating a business plan and what key components you need to include.

1. Create an executive summary

Start with a brief overview of your entire plan. The executive summary should cover your business plan's main points and key takeaways.

Keep your executive summary concise and clear with the Executive Summary Template . The simple design helps readers understand the crux of your business plan without reading the entire document.

2. Write your company description

Provide a detailed explanation of your company. Include information on what your company does, the mission statement, and your vision for the future.

Provide additional background information on the history of your company, the founders, and any notable achievements or milestones.

3. Conduct a market analysis

Conduct an in-depth analysis of your industry, competitors, and target market. This is best done with a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Next, identify your target market's needs, demographics, and behaviors.

Use the Competitive Analysis Template to brainstorm answers to simple questions like:

What does the current market look like?

Who are your competitors?

What are they offering?

What will give you a competitive advantage?

Who is your target market?

What are they looking for and why?

How will your product or service satisfy a need?

These questions should give you valuable insights into the current market and where your business stands.

4. Describe your products and services

Provide detailed information about your products and services. This includes pricing information, product features, and any unique selling points.

Use the Product/Market Fit Template to explain how your products meet the needs of your target market. Describe what sets them apart from the competition.

5. Design a marketing and sales strategy

Outline how you plan to promote and sell your products. Your marketing strategy and sales strategy should include information about your:

Pricing strategy

Advertising and promotional tactics

Sales channels

The Go to Market Strategy Template is a great way to visually map how you plan to launch your product or service in a new or existing market.

6. Determine budget and financial projections

Document detailed information on your business’ finances. Describe the current financial position of the company and how you expect the finances to play out.

Some details to include in this section are:

Startup costs

Revenue projections

Profit and loss statement

Funding you have received or plan to receive

Strategy for raising funds

7. Set the organization and management structure

Define how your company is structured and who will be responsible for each aspect of the business. Use the Business Organizational Chart Template to visually map the company’s teams, roles, and hierarchy.

As well as the organization and management structure, discuss the legal structure of your business. Clarify whether your business is a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, or LLC.

8. Make an action plan

At this point in your business plan, you’ve described what you’re aiming for. But how are you going to get there? The Action Plan Template describes the following steps to move your business plan forward. Outline the next steps you plan to take to bring your business plan to fruition.

Types of business plans

Several types of business plans cater to different purposes and stages of a company's lifecycle. Here are some of the most common types of business plans.

Startup business plan

A startup business plan is typically an entrepreneur's first business plan. This document helps entrepreneurs articulate their business idea when starting a new business.

Not sure how to make a business plan for a startup? It’s pretty similar to a regular business plan, except the primary purpose of a startup business plan is to convince investors to provide funding for the business. A startup business plan also outlines the potential target market, product/service offering, marketing plan, and financial projections.

Strategic business plan

A strategic business plan is a long-term plan that outlines a company's overall strategy, objectives, and tactics. This type of strategic plan focuses on the big picture and helps business owners set goals and priorities and measure progress.

The primary purpose of a strategic business plan is to provide direction and guidance to the company's management team and stakeholders. The plan typically covers a period of three to five years.

Operational business plan

An operational business plan is a detailed document that outlines the day-to-day operations of a business. It focuses on the specific activities and processes required to run the business, such as:

Organizational structure

Staffing plan

Production plan

Quality control

Inventory management

Supply chain

The primary purpose of an operational business plan is to ensure that the business runs efficiently and effectively. It helps business owners manage their resources, track their performance, and identify areas for improvement.

Growth-business plan

A growth-business plan is a strategic plan that outlines how a company plans to expand its business. It helps business owners identify new market opportunities and increase revenue and profitability. The primary purpose of a growth-business plan is to provide a roadmap for the company's expansion and growth.

The 3 Horizons of Growth Template is a great tool to identify new areas of growth. This framework categorizes growth opportunities into three categories: Horizon 1 (core business), Horizon 2 (emerging business), and Horizon 3 (potential business).

One-page business plan

A one-page business plan is a condensed version of a full business plan that focuses on the most critical aspects of a business. It’s a great tool for entrepreneurs who want to quickly communicate their business idea to potential investors, partners, or employees.

A one-page business plan typically includes sections such as business concept, value proposition, revenue streams, and cost structure.

Best practices for how to make a good business plan

Here are some additional tips for creating a business plan:

Use a template

A template can help you organize your thoughts and effectively communicate your business ideas and strategies. Starting with a template can also save you time and effort when formatting your plan.

Miro’s extensive library of customizable templates includes all the necessary sections for a comprehensive business plan. With our templates, you can confidently present your business plans to stakeholders and investors.

Be practical

Avoid overestimating revenue projections or underestimating expenses. Your business plan should be grounded in practical realities like your budget, resources, and capabilities.

Be specific

Provide as much detail as possible in your business plan. A specific plan is easier to execute because it provides clear guidance on what needs to be done and how. Without specific details, your plan may be too broad or vague, making it difficult to know where to start or how to measure success.

Be thorough with your research

Conduct thorough research to fully understand the market, your competitors, and your target audience . By conducting thorough research, you can identify potential risks and challenges your business may face and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Get input from others

It can be easy to become overly focused on your vision and ideas, leading to tunnel vision and a lack of objectivity. By seeking input from others, you can identify potential opportunities you may have overlooked.

Review and revise regularly

A business plan is a living document. You should update it regularly to reflect market, industry, and business changes. Set aside time for regular reviews and revisions to ensure your plan remains relevant and effective.

Create a winning business plan to chart your path to success

Starting or growing a business can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, a well-written business plan can make or break your business’ success.

The purpose of a business plan is more than just to secure funding and attract investors. It also serves as a roadmap for achieving your business goals and realizing your vision. With the right mindset, tools, and strategies, you can develop a visually appealing, persuasive business plan.

Ready to make an effective business plan that works for you? Check out our library of ready-made strategy and planning templates and chart your path to success.

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The 5 steps of the strategic planning process

Starting a project without a strategy is like trying to bake a cake without a recipe — you might have all the ingredients you need, but without a plan for how to combine them, or a vision for what the finished product will look like, you’re likely to end up with a mess. This is especially true when working with a team — it’s crucial to have a shared plan that can serve as a map on the pathway to success.

Creating a strategic plan not only provides a useful document for the future, but also helps you define what you have right now, and think through and outline all of the steps and considerations you’ll need to succeed.

What is strategic planning?

While there is no single approach to creating a strategic plan, most approaches can be boiled down to five overarching steps:

• Define your vision
• Assess where you are
• Determine your priorities and objectives
• Define responsibilities
• Measure and evaluate results

Each step requires close collaboration as you build a shared vision, strategy for implementation, and system for understanding performance.

Related: Learn how to hold an effective strategic planning meeting

Why do I need a strategic plan?

Building a strategic plan is the best way to ensure that your whole team is on the same page, from the initial vision and the metrics for success to evaluating outcomes and adjusting (if necessary) for the future. Even if you’re an expert baker, working with a team to bake a cake means having a collaborative approach and clearly defined steps so that the result reflects the strategic goals you laid out at the beginning.

The benefits of strategic planning also permeate into the general efficiency and productivity of your organization as a whole. They include: 

• Greater attention to potential biases or flaws, improving decision-making 
• Clear direction and focus, motivating and engaging employees
• Better resource management, improving project outcomes 
• Improved employee performance, increasing profitability
• Enhanced communication and collaboration, fostering team efficiency 

Next, let’s dive into how to build and structure your strategic plan, complete with templates and assets to help you along the way.

Before you begin: Pick a brainstorming method

There are many brainstorming methods you can use to come up with, outline, and rank your priorities. When it comes to strategy planning, it’s important to get everyone’s thoughts and ideas out before committing to any one strategy. With the right facilitation , brainstorming helps make this process fair and transparent for everyone involved.  

First, decide if you want to run a real-time rapid ideation session or a structured brainstorming . In a rapid ideation session, you encourage sharing half-baked or silly ideas, typically within a set time frame. The key is to just get out all your ideas quickly and then edit the best ones. Examples of rapid ideation methods include round robin , brainwriting , mind mapping , and crazy eights . 

In a structured brainstorming session, you allow for more time to prepare and edit your thoughts before getting together to share and discuss those more polished ideas. This might involve brainstorming methods that entail unconventional ways of thinking, such as reverse brainstorming or rolestorming . 

Using a platform like Mural, you can easily capture and organize your team’s ideas through sticky notes, diagrams, text, or even images and videos. These features allow you to build actionable next steps immediately (and in the same place) through color coding and tagging. 

Whichever method you choose, the ideal outcome is that you avoid groupthink by giving everyone a voice and a say. Once you’ve reached a consensus on your top priorities, add specific objectives tied to each of those priorities.

Related: Brainstorming and ideation template

1. Define your vision

Whether it’s for your business as a whole, or a specific initiative, successful strategic planning involves alignment with a vision for success. You can think of it as a project-specific mission statement or a north star to guide employees toward fulfilling organizational goals. 

To create a vision statement that explicitly states the ideal results of your project or company transformation, follow these four key steps: 

• Engage and involve the entire team . Inclusivity like this helps bring diverse perspectives to the table. 
• Align the vision with your core values and purpose . This will make it familiar and easy to follow through. 
• Stay grounded . The vision should be ambitious enough to motivate and inspire yet grounded enough to be achievable and relevant.
• Think long-term flexibility . Consider future trends and how your vision can be flexible in the face of challenges or opportunities. 

For example, say your vision is to revolutionize customer success by streamlining and optimizing your process for handling support tickets. It’s important to have a strategy map that allows stakeholders (like the support team, marketing team, and engineering team) to know the overall objective and understand the roles they will play in realizing the goals. 

This can be done in real time or asynchronously , whether in person, hybrid, or remote. By leveraging a shared digital space , everyone has a voice in the process and room to add their thoughts, comments, and feedback. 

Related: Vision board template

2. Assess where you are

The next step in creating a strategic plan is to conduct an assessment of where you stand in terms of your own initiatives, as well as the greater marketplace. Start by conducting a resource assessment. Figure out which financial, human, and/or technological resources you have available and if there are any limitations. You can do this using a SWOT analysis.

What is SWOT analysis?

SWOT analysis is an exercise where you define:

• Strengths: What are your unique strengths for this initiative or this product? In what ways are you a leader?
• Weaknesses: What weaknesses can you identify in your offering? How does your product compare to others in the marketplace?
• Opportunities: Are there areas for improvement that'd help differentiate your business?
• Threats: Beyond weaknesses, are there existing potential threats to your idea that could limit or prevent its success? How can those be anticipated?

For example, say you have an eco-friendly tech company and your vision is to launch a new service in the next year. Here’s what the SWOT analysis might look like: 

• Strengths : Strong brand reputation, loyal customer base, and a talented team focused on innovation
• Weaknesses : Limited bandwidth to work on new projects, which might impact the scope of its strategy formulation 
• Opportunities : How to leverage and experiment with existing customers when goal-setting
• Threats : Factors in the external environment out of its control, like the state of the economy and supply chain shortages

This SWOT analysis will guide the company in setting strategic objectives and formulating a robust plan to navigate the challenges it might face. 

Related: SWOT analysis template

3. Determine your priorities and objectives

Once you've identified your organization’s mission and current standing, start a preliminary plan document that outlines your priorities and their corresponding objectives. Priorities and objectives should be set based on what is achievable with your available resources. The SMART framework is a great way to ensure you set effective goals . It looks like this:  

• Specific: Set clear objectives, leaving no room for ambiguity about the desired outcomes.
• Measurable : Choose quantifiable criteria to make it easier to track progress.
• Achievable : Ensure it is realistic and attainable within the constraints of your resources and environment.
• Relevant : Develop objectives that are relevant to the direction your organization seeks to move.
• Time-bound : Set a clear timeline for achieving each objective to maintain a sense of urgency and focus.

For instance, going back to the eco-friendly tech company, the SMART goals might be: 

• Specific : Target residential customers and small businesses to increase the sales of its solar-powered device line by 25%. 
• Measurable : Track monthly sales and monitor customer feedback and reviews. 
• Achievable : Allocate more resources to the marketing, sales, and customer service departments. 
• Relevant : Supports the company's growth goals in a growing market of eco-conscious consumers. 
• Time-bound : Conduct quarterly reviews and achieve this 25% increase in sales over the next 12 months.

With strategic objectives like this, you’ll be ready to put the work into action. 

Related: Project kickoff template

4. Define tactics and responsibilities

In this stage, individuals or units within your team can get granular about how to achieve your goals and who'll be accountable for each step. For example, the senior leadership team might be in charge of assigning specific tasks to their team members, while human resources works on recruiting new talent. 

It’s important to note that everyone’s responsibilities may shift over time as you launch and gather initial data about your project. For this reason, it’s key to define responsibilities with clear short-term metrics for success. This way, you can make sure that your plan is adaptable to changing circumstances. 

One of the more common ways to define tactics and metrics is to use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method. By outlining your OKRs, you’ll know exactly what key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and have a framework for analyzing the results once you begin to accumulate relevant data. 

For instance, if our eco-friendly tech company has a goal of increasing sales, one objective might be to expand market reach for its solar-powered products. The sales team lead would be in charge of developing an outreach strategy. The key result would be to successfully launch its products in two new regions by Q2. The KPI would be a 60% conversation rate in those targeted markets.  

Related: OKR planning template  

5. Manage, measure, and evaluate

Once your plan is set into motion, it’s important to actively manage (and measure) progress. Before launching your plan, settle on a management process that allows you to measure success or failure. In this way, everyone is aligned on progress and can come together to evaluate your strategy execution at regular intervals.

Determine the milestones at which you’ll come together and go over results — this can take place weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the nature of the project.

One of the best ways to evaluate progress is through agile retrospectives (or retros) , which can be done in real time or asynchronously. During this process, gather and organize feedback about the key elements that played a role in your strategy. 

Related: Retrospective radar template

Retrospectives are typically divided into three parts:

• What went well.
• What didn’t go well.
• New opportunities for improvement.

This structure is also sometimes called the “ rose, thorn, bud ” framework. By using this approach, team members can collectively brainstorm and categorize their feedback, making the next steps clear and actionable. Creating an action plan during a post-mortem meeting is a crucial step in ensuring that lessons learned from past projects or events are effectively translated into tangible improvements. 

Another method for reviewing progress is the quarterly business review (QBR). Like the agile retrospective, it allows you to collect feedback and adjust accordingly. In the case of QBRs, however, we recommend dividing your feedback into four categories:

• Start (what new items should be launched?).
• Stop (what items need to be paused?).
• Continue (what is going well?).
• Change (what could be modified to perform better?).

Strategic planners know that planning activities continue even after a project is complete. There’s always room for improvement and an action plan waiting to be implemented. Using the above approaches, your team can make room for new ideas within the existing strategic framework in order to track better to your long-term goals.

Related: Quarterly business review template

Conclusions

The beauty of the strategic plan is that it can be applied from the campaign level all the way up to organizational vision. Using the strategic planning framework, you build buy-in , trust, and transparency by collaboratively creating a vision for success, and mapping out the steps together on the road to your goals.

Also, in so doing, you build in an ability to adapt effectively on the fly in response to data through measurement and evaluation, making your plan both flexible and resilient.

Related: 5 Tips for Holding Effective Post-mortems

Why Mural for strategic planning

Mural unlocks collaborative strategic planning through a shared digital space with an intuitive interface, a library of pre-fab templates, and methodologies based on design thinking principles.

Outline goals, identify key metrics, and track progress with a platform built for any enterprise.

Learn more about strategic planning with Mural.

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

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How to Write a Business Plan: Your Step-by-Step Guide

So, you’ve got an idea and you want to start a business —great! Before you do anything else, like seek funding or build out a team, you'll need to know how to write a business plan. This plan will serve as the foundation of your company while also giving investors and future employees a clear idea of your purpose.

Below, Lauren Cobello, Founder and CEO of Leverage with Media PR , gives her best advice on how to make a business plan for your company.

Build your dream business with the help of a high-paying job—browse open jobs on The Muse »

What is a business plan, and when do you need one?

According to Cobello, a business plan is a document that contains the mission of the business and a brief overview of it, as well as the objectives, strategies, and financial plans of the founder. A business plan comes into play very early on in the process of starting a company—more or less before you do anything else.

“You should start a company with a business plan in mind—especially if you plan to get funding for the company,” Cobello says. “You’re going to need it.”

Whether that funding comes from a loan, an investor, or crowdsourcing, a business plan is imperative to secure the capital, says the U.S. Small Business Administration . Anyone who’s considering giving you money is going to want to review your business plan before doing so. That means before you head into any meeting, make sure you have physical copies of your business plan to share.

Different types of business plans

The four main types of business plans are:

Startup Business Plans

Internal business plans, strategic business plans, one-page business plans.

Let's break down each one:

If you're wondering how to write a business plan for a startup, Cobello has advice for you. Startup business plans are the most common type, she says, and they are a critical tool for new business ventures that want funding. A startup is defined as a company that’s in its first stages of operations, founded by an entrepreneur who has a product or service idea.

Most startups begin with very little money, so they need a strong business plan to convince family, friends, banks, and/or venture capitalists to invest in the new company.

Internal business plans “are for internal use only,” says Cobello. This kind of document is not public-facing, only company-facing, and it contains an outline of the company’s business strategy, financial goals and budgets, and performance data.

Internal business plans aren’t used to secure funding, but rather to set goals and get everyone working there tracking towards them.

As the name implies, strategic business plans are geared more towards strategy and they include an assessment of the current business landscape, notes Jérôme Côté, a Business Advisor at BDC Advisory Services .

Unlike a traditional business plan, Cobello adds, strategic plans include a SWOT analysis (which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and an in-depth action plan for the next six to 12 months. Strategic plans are action-based and take into account the state of the company and the industry in which it exists.

Although a typical business plan falls between 15 to 30 pages, some companies opt for the much shorter One-Page Business Plan. A one-page business plan is a simplified version of the larger business plan, and it focuses on the problem your product or service is solving, the solution (your product), and your business model (how you’ll make money).

A one-page plan is hyper-direct and easy to read, making it an effective tool for businesses of all sizes, at any stage.

How to create a business plan in 7 steps

Every business plan is different, and the steps you take to complete yours will depend on what type and format you choose. That said, if you need a place to start and appreciate a roadmap, here’s what Cobello recommends:

1. Conduct your research

Before writing your business plan, you’ll want to do a thorough investigation of what’s out there. Who will be the competitors for your product or service? Who is included in the target market? What industry trends are you capitalizing on, or rebuking? You want to figure out where you sit in the market and what your company’s value propositions are. What makes you different—and better?

2. Define your purpose for the business plan

The purpose of your business plan will determine which kind of plan you choose to create. Are you trying to drum up funding, or get the company employees focused on specific goals? (For the former, you’d want a startup business plan, while an internal plan would satisfy the latter.) Also, consider your audience. An investment firm that sees hundreds of potential business plans a day may prefer to see a one-pager upfront and, if they’re interested, a longer plan later.

3. Write your company description

Every business plan needs a company description—aka a summary of the company’s purpose, what they do/offer, and what makes it unique. Company descriptions should be clear and concise, avoiding the use of jargon, Cobello says. Ideally, descriptions should be a few paragraphs at most.

4. Explain and show how the company will make money

A business plan should be centered around the company’s goals, and it should clearly explain how the company will generate revenue. To do this, Cobello recommends using actual numbers and details, as opposed to just projections.

For instance, if the company is already making money, show how much and at what cost (e.g. what was the net profit). If it hasn’t generated revenue yet, outline the plan for how it will—including what the product/service will cost to produce and how much it will cost the consumer.

5. Outline your marketing strategy

How will you promote the business? Through what channels will you be promoting it? How are you going to reach and appeal to your target market? The more specific and thorough you can be with your plans here, the better, Cobello says.

6. Explain how you’ll spend your funding

What will you do with the money you raise? What are the first steps you plan to take? As a founder, you want to instill confidence in your investors and show them that the instant you receive their money, you’ll be taking smart actions that grow the company.

7. Include supporting documents

Creating a business plan is in some ways akin to building a legal case, but for your business. “You want to tell a story, and to be as thorough as possible, while keeping your plan succinct, clear, interesting, and visually appealing,” Cobello says. “Supporting documents could include financial projects, a competitive analysis of the market you’re entering into, and even any licenses, patents, or permits you’ve secured.”

A business plan is an individualized document—it’s ultimately up to you what information to include and what story you tell. But above all, Cobello says, your business plan should have a clear focus and goal in mind, because everything else will build off this cornerstone.

“Many people don’t realize how important business plans are for the health of their company,” she says. “Set aside time to make this a priority for your business, and make sure to keep it updated as you grow.”

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Bibliometrics & citations, view options, recommendations, evolution of three nobel prize themes and a nobel snub theme in chemistry: a bibliometric study with focus on international collaboration.

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More From Forbes

Ceo confidentiality: guarding business secrets for competitive edge.

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CEO, Atlas Surgical Group , one of the largest ASC groups in U.S. Author of "Success in Amb. Surgery Ctrs" and "The Healthcare Entrepreneur."

Khalil Gibran once wrote , "If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees." In the realm of business, the role of a CEO extends beyond leadership and strategic vision; it encompasses the critical responsibility of safeguarding confidential information.

This duty is paramount to maintaining a competitive edge in the market. The dissemination of sensitive information, whether intentional or accidental, can significantly undermine a company’s strategic positioning, operational success and market reputation. While I am no proponent of restrictive covenants, they were created with the good intent to protect such interests.

Below are key areas of confidentiality that a CEO diligently protects, illustrated with real-life examples and references.

1. Financial Performance

Maintaining the confidentiality of a company's financial performance is crucial, particularly in fluctuating markets where investor confidence is key. The business world is cut-throat, and the revelation of strengths, or weaknesses as the case might be, invites the proverbial vultures to attack you.

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I think Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, exemplifies this strategy. In Tesla's early stages, Musk meticulously managed the release of financial data to maintain investor confidence and secure necessary funding, even when the company was not yet profitable . His careful handling of financial disclosures helped stabilize and eventually propel Tesla's market presence.

2. Strategic Plans

Strategic plans are the blueprints for a company's future and must be closely guarded to prevent competitors from gaining an advantage. If everyone is aware of your strategy, you inadvertently empower them with the same roadmap, transforming your unique advantage into a common plan.

As an example, Jeff Bezos, former CEO of Amazon, kept the development of Amazon Prime under tight wraps until its launch. This secrecy allowed Amazon to revolutionize e-commerce with a groundbreaking subscription service, securing a substantial market lead before competitors could respond.

3. Business Partnerships

There's an African proverb that goes : "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." Business partnerships can significantly influence a company’s trajectory, making their confidentiality essential.

It is often more advantageous to be a small part of a larger, thriving enterprise than to hold a significant stake in a modest, limited venture. Being a small piece of a big pie means you are part of a more extensive and dynamic ecosystem that can often offer greater opportunities for growth, collaboration and influence. This position allows you to leverage the extensive resources, networks and innovations of a larger entity, which can exponentially enhance your impact and success.

And partnerships can be classified info as well in the business world, much like other business secrets. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, is known for maintaining secrecy around Apple’s partnerships. This strategic confidentiality allowed Apple to manage its product transitions smoothly, minimizing market disruptions.

4. Marketing Strategies

Confidentiality in marketing strategies is essential for creating competitive and effective campaigns. By keeping plans under wraps, companies can prevent competitors from countering their moves and can build suspense and anticipation among consumers.

Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, exemplified the power of secrecy in marketing. He was particularly adept at maintaining a shroud of mystery around product launches. This strategic concealment was crucial in generating public anticipation and media frenzy, which played a significant role in the success of Apple’s marketing campaigns.

For instance, the original iPhone’s launch details were kept under tight wraps until its official unveiling. This secrecy not only heightened public curiosity but also ensured that Apple had complete control over the narrative. When Jobs finally revealed the iPhone in January 2007 , the announcement was a watershed moment in technology history, setting the stage for the iPhone’s phenomenal success.

5. Product Development

Confidentiality in product development is a pivotal strategy for companies aiming to maintain a competitive edge. By keeping details of new initiatives under wraps, businesses can protect their innovations, surprise the market and strategically position themselves ahead of competitors. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), has demonstrated the importance of this approach through several high-profile, confidential projects.

One notable example is Meta’s acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014. This purchase was not just a transaction but a strategic move to integrate virtual reality (VR) into Facebook’s ecosystem, significantly shaping the company’s long-term vision. The acquisition was managed with a high degree of secrecy, which was crucial for its success.

6. Business Model

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote , "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." Innovations in business models are often the cornerstone of a company’s success and need to be protected until fully implemented.

The confidentiality of new business models prevents competitors from copying or countering these strategies prematurely. In a rapidly evolving market, the element of surprise can provide a substantial head start. For example, when a company develops a novel business model, such as a disruptive pricing strategy or a unique customer engagement approach, keeping these plans confidential ensures the firm can establish itself in the market without facing immediate competitive pressure.

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, maintained the confidentiality of Netflix’s shift from DVD rentals to streaming. This well-guarded secret provided Netflix with a significant head start in the streaming market, establishing it as a dominant player before competitors could react, highlighting the importance of this business strategy.

In conclusion, a CEO’s responsibility to protect business secrets is vital for sustaining a competitive advantage. Confidential information spans financial performance, strategic plans, business partnerships, marketing strategies, product development, business models and employee information.

By keeping these aspects under wraps, a CEO ensures that the company can operate securely and strategically, navigating the competitive landscape with resilience and innovation. This careful stewardship of sensitive information not only fortifies a company’s current market position but also paves the way for future growth and success.

In the words of Virginia Woolf , "The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages." Be careful who gets to watch you.

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The New Rules of Marketing Across Channels

• Joshua Bowers,
• Denise Linda Parris,
• Qiong Wang,
• Danny McRae,
• Francisco Guzmán,
• Mark Bolino

Strategies for navigating a new kind of communication landscape: the “echoverse.”

The Internet and AI tools are transforming marketing communications within a complex, interactive landscape called the echoverse. While marketing has evolved since the proliferation of the Internet, in the echoverse, a diverse network of human and nonhuman actors — consumers, brands, AI agents, and more — continuously interact, influence, and reshape messages across digital platforms. Traditional one-way and two-way communication models give way to omnidirectional communication. The authors integrated communication theory and theories of marketing communications to create a typology of marketing communication strategies consisting of three established strategies — 1) promotion marketing, 2) relationship marketing, and 3) customer engagement marketing — and their proposed strategy, 4) echoverse marketing. The authors also recommend three strategies for marketers to make the shift from leading messaging to guiding messaging: 1) Enable co-creation and co-ownership, 2) Create directed learning opportunities, and 3) Develop a mindset of continuous learning.

Today, companies must navigate a new kind of communication landscape: the “ echoverse .” This new terrain is defined by a complex web of feedback loops and reverberations that are created by consumers, brands, news media, investors, communities, society, and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. This assemblage of actors continuously interact, influence, and respond to each other across a myriad of digital channels, platforms, and devices, creating a dynamic where messages circulate and echo, being amplified, modified, or dampened by ongoing interactions.

• JB Joshua Bowers is Co-CEO of Pavilion Intelligence, a marketing science consultancy and upcycled timber operation. He has a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Oklahoma and is a leader in new product development for enterprise and marketing technology.
• DP Denise Linda Parris is Co-CEO Pavilion Intelligence, a marketing science consultancy and upcycled timber operation. She has been a professional athlete, entrepreneur, and academic with research focused on servant leadership, societal impact, and marketing technology.
• QW Qiong Wang is the Ruby K. Powell Professor of Marketing and Associate Professor of Marketing and Supply Chain at the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business. Her research focuses on the processes and boundaries of inter-organizational issues, including the development and management of strategic partnerships, marketing strategies, and supply chain management.
• DM Danny McRae is a technology professional with over 20 years of experience in information architecture.
• FG Francisco Guzmán is Professor of Marketing at the University of North Texas’ G. Brint Ryan College of Business. His research focuses on how brands can drive social transformation.
• MB Mark Bolino is the David L. Boren Professor and the Michael F. Price Chair in International Business at the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business. His research focuses on understanding how an organization can inspire its employees to go the extra mile without compromising their personal well-being.

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