Category: Blog

Strategic planning is an essential part of every organization. The process may seem daunting, and even a bit scary, but the best results often come from the hardest challenges. Strategic plans come in many different forms, shapes, and sizes, and typically range from 3-5 years of goals and action items. If you’re in that 3–5-year threshold or haven’t “completed” your strategic plan yet, when do you know it’s time for a new strategic plan?

1) You haven’t updated your strategic plan in years.

Your strategic plan was your guidepost at some point. You have one, and you’ve skated by for years without rethinking your strategies, goals, or objectives for your business. You’re probably doing okay without it but updating your strategic plan can take your organization to the next level. No risk = no reward.

2) You have a strategic plan but haven’t touched it in 6+ months.

You just went through completing a strategic plan, but you haven’t looked at it in months. Maybe you regret it. There are a lot of reasons strategic plans don’t work out. Sometimes, they’re boring slide decks with no action items, don’t hold anyone accountable for execution, and don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.

There’s also a chance business fluctuates, and your strategic plan is now irrelevant. The goals no longer match up with your vision, and the company has pivoted. If that’s the case – it’s worth spending the extra time and money to get your strategic plan to where it needs to be.

3) There are no attainable KPIs or direct ROI attached to your strategic plan execution.

A strategic plan may include tactics and action items – but doesn’t always tell you what key performance indicators (KPI’s) or what sort of ROI is directly attributed to it. Strategic plans typically aren’t cheap, making success metrics incredibly important in measuring your plan’s impact on your organization. Ultimately, a strategic plan should pay for itself with the results it induces. If your strategic plan includes any “best practices” or tactics that can be found on the first search engine result page (SERP), it’s time to invest in a new strategic plan.

4) Your strategic plan isn’t driving revenue, relevancy, or impact for your organization.

Typically, our partners’ goals can all relate to maximizing their revenue, relevancy, and impact. Our Strategic Growth Plans goal is that, when executed, directly tie into fulfilling your mission, vision, and values. Whatever your growth goals or metrics may be, your strategic plan must be working towards them. Misalignment is a silent destroyer of strategic plan execution. A good strategic planning partner will help you identify, amplify, and communicate your organization’s growth goals, ensuring misalignment and miscommunication won’t be a problem when it’s time for implementation.

5) Your strategic plan is too restrictive.

When crafting strategic plans for our partners, we practice having an abundance mindset. Instead of focusing on creating guard rails, outlining what you shouldn’t do or what needs to be eliminated from your organization, we focus on what to amplify. Our goal is to help our partners continuously develop what is already working and build upon that foundation to accelerate growth. Instead of telling you what you can’t do, we focus on what you can do.

A good strategic plan is your playbook for exponential growth for your organization. It should clearly outline your goals, your current state, and detail what you need to do to achieve the success you’re looking for.

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Prolific has helped hundreds of partners worldwide grow exponentially through growth strategy, growth capital, and growth performance. If you’re interested in learning more about Prolific, go to Growth Practices, see our Success Stories, or tell us about your growth metric.

You’re in a place many business leaders have found themselves in before. You’re stuck. Your growth is incremental when it should be exponential. You’ve been doing the same things with the same results for too many years. You have an incredible vision for your organization, but your performance is lagging. You’re tired of being your industry’s best-kept secret. Strategic Growth Plans change all of those paradigms.

Strategic Growth Plans are a part of our growth strategy practice. They are a robust guiding document that captures your five-year vision and turns it into an actionable plan for aggressive gains in the metrics that matter most to your organization. You dream big and cast your vision. We listen intently, dream alongside you, and begin to discover ways to maximize your revenue, relevancy, and impact.

What a Strategic Growth Plan is Not:

• A 40-slide PowerPoint presentation that sits in your files, unopened for months
• Research from the first 20 results on Google
• A one-size-fits-all templated plan
• Made for one person in your organization to utilize
• Rigid, strict, not flexible as business changes

What a Strategic Growth Plan Is:

• A detailed five-year plan focused on exponential growth
• Extensive research on you, your industry, and your competitors
• Custom to your business
• Accessible to anyone who needs it
• Flexible, ebbs and flows as your business continues to grow and change
• Includes strategies that are affordable and responsible

A typical Strategic Growth Plan takes six months to craft, write, and deliver and has six different steps to complete. It’s a pretty easy timeline to remember: six months + six steps = a future of success.

The Six Steps of a Strategic Growth Plan

1. 1) Immersion
2. 2) Research
3. 3) Strategy Development
4. 4) Tie Backs
5. 5) Delivery + Presentation
6. 6) Implementation + Execution (Optional)

1) Immersion

Prolific Immersions are 2-3 day discovery meetings with you and the most important shareholders from your team. We ask questions, conduct workshops, and facilitate discussions to understand your team dynamic, your overall company goals, and growth expectations, both immediate and long-term. From our experience, the most successful Immersions happen when both parties share boldly and freely.

2) Research

Our research aims to do three main things: find insights hiding in plain sight, answer questions you’ve been wrestling with for a long time, and tell you things you didn’t already know. We occasionally engage with our Growth Network to help us conduct further research if needed. Conducting exhaustive, sound research is crucial for our strategists to make successful recommendations for growth strategies.

3) Strategy Development

Strategy development is typically the halfway point in our process – and where the real magic happens. Once we have thoroughly reviewed our notes and takeaways from the immersion and conducted our research, strategy development begins. Prolific’s strategy team handcrafts each strategy and recommends action items based on research, your business’ financials, and your team’s capability to complete them. Each strategy is carefully aligned with a goal in your organization to further your growth. When strategy development is complete, we pause, check-in, and present them in their totality before continuing with the Strategic Growth Plan process.

4) Tie Backs

Tiebacks are exactly what they sound like – we ensure every strategy is affordable and achievable, that someone will be responsible for them, and have a timing and action plan of when and how to complete it over the course of five years. This is where most consultants stop and where we are just getting started.

We collaborate with your CFO to determine how each strategy will be affordable and financially responsible relative to your organization’s financial position. We will never suggest a strategy that’s too expensive.

Each strategy requires an internal champion. Who will be in charge of overseeing the strategy to completion and measuring its success? Different leaders are often selected to lead different strategies that align with their departments, department goals, and general area of expertise. It’s impossible for just one person to be the pinnacle of success for a Strategic Growth Plan – it is a team, and all-company, effort.

Strategy champions are never left hanging with just the tactics and affordability plan: our tiebacks include a timing + action plan that maps out when each strategy should begin, when progress should be made, and when it should be completed.

With a clear path to affording the strategy, a leader in championing it, and a mapped-out timing + action, each strategy sets you up for lasting success. It’s as easy as one, two, three.

5) Delivery + Presentation

We don’t just conduct research, develop strategies, and send it to you tied in a bow to go on your merry way. We schedule a time to go through every page of this robust delivery. We review and answer any questions you may have on our research, strategies, or implementation tactics. You can also opt to have an executive summary review for a bite-sized delivery.

6) Implementation + Execution (Optional)

Our SGP’s are specifically designed to be implemented on your own, without a partner. While implementation + execution of your Strategic Growth Plan is not typically included in our partnership’s first phase, many of our partners engage us to implement and measure their plans’ success. What better partner than the one who knows your business inside and out?

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Prolific has helped hundreds of partners worldwide grow exponentially through growth strategy, growth capital, and growth performance. If you want to learn more about Prolific, go to Growth Services, see our Growth Stories, or tell us about your growth metric.