{"id":283,"date":"2019-01-16T11:45:53","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T19:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/?p=283"},"modified":"2021-10-18T10:37:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T17:37:41","slug":"strategic-planning-for-business-owners-the-first-in-a-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/strategic-planning-for-business-owners-the-first-in-a-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Strategic Planning For Business Owners – The first in a Series"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The start of a new year is an ideal time to reflect on the previous year’s performance and devise a plan for achieving success over the next 365 days. Without a healthy measure of planning and strategic thinking, the only way to achieve success is through sheer luck! Let\u2019s be honest, as business owners, who is really okay with leaving their future to luck? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Day-to-day tasks can seem never-ending and it\u2019s all too easy to get sucked in and spend days on end doing nothing to grow the business, only dealing with the current tasks. As the owner of a business, it\u2019s great to get involved and steer the ship, but it\u2019s crucial to take the time and focus on growth. Delegate as many of the day-to-day tasks as you can, so that you can focus on strategic development and growth. The survival of your business depends on this. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step One: Reviewing the Previous Year<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Over the next few weeks, our blog posts are going to focus on strategic management and this is your first installment. Step one is to carry out a fair assessment of the previous year. Ask yourself which areas were successful, which projects yielded the best results? Start by focusing on the successes, it\u2019s important to celebrate these with your wider team. If you don\u2019t already, consider holding an end-of-year awards event with your team to share the good moments and highlight those employees who went the extra mile. You can\u2019t do this alone and your employees are your biggest asset. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next step is to look at what you could have done better. It\u2019s time to get brutally honest with yourself about what went wrong last year. Where did you miss the boat and which areas could have been improved on? Thomas Edison was the inventor of the incandescent lightbulb and founded Edison Electric which later became General Electric Corporation. The lightbulb was created based on 1,000\u2019s of trial and error experiments in the lab. When asked later how it felt to \u201cfail\u201d so many times, Thomas Edison replied \u201cI have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work\u201d. The point is, it\u2019s often in the failures that we learn the most. If we win every time we don\u2019t learn how to problem solve and we, therefore, don\u2019t learn resilience.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than doing this exercise in your head, write down everything as you go. Use mind-maps, brainstorm ideas on a white-board or type up notes as you think. The process of writing things down re-confirms things in your mind. It spurs new ideas and it serves as a reminder each time you come back to your strategic planning. There is something more impactful about the process of formally capturing and evaluating each item.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask Why?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For every item, you list, whether a success or a failure you need to ask yourself why? Why was Project X so successful? Why did you lose that big deal? Why was employee retention lower last year? etc. For each \u2018why\u2019 you need to break it down further. Don\u2019t simply write the obvious, but start to form a bigger picture of what caused the outcome. Usually, it\u2019s a collection of several smaller actions\/events that lead to a larger outcome. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a process that will take a little time. Now, time is something you probably don\u2019t have a lot of. As a business owner that\u2019s understandable and very normal! Simply try to commit a couple of hours to this task, to begin with, and break the process down. Follow this series of articles as they are published and use them a guide. Keep an eye out for new articles via our social media channels on Twitter, Linkedin & Facebook. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com<\/a>) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The start of a new year is an ideal time to reflect on the previous year’s performance and devise a plan for achieving success over the next 365 days. Without a healthy measure of planning and strategic thinking, the only way to achieve success is through sheer luck! Let\u2019s be honest, as business owners, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":285,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":636,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zairmail.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}