Tips to implement an effective business strategy (guest post)

The article below was contributed by Aileen Pablo, who is an Australia-based business and finance blogger. Among her areas of specialty are entrepreneurship and strategy for small businesses and I was excited when she reached out to me about sharing some tips with my audience, as it would fit well with my goal to make this site into more of a general business resource versus one solely for MBA and Management Consulting types.

Without further delay…

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Tips to implement an effective business strategy
By Aileen Pablo

You know you’ve got a million-dollar idea but how do you turn that into a successful company?

Before you try to secure funding and open your doors to the public, it’s important that you put together an effective business strategy. What’s a business strategy? Essentially, it’s a document that tells you which direction a company should pursue and the steps involved in achieving the goals you set down in your mission statement.

In short, if the mission statement says, “this is who we want to be and what we want to do,” a business strategy outlines how you can do that. Simple enough, right?

If your business isn’t actually up and running yet, implementing the plan should be fairly easy. All you have to do is meet with your various departments, ensure that they understand what the strategy entails, and allocate the necessary resources in their area to achieve company goals. Both short-term and long-term goals should be considered, and you need to look at how both play into the overall direction and branding of the company.

This can be difficult when your company is already doing business but falling short of your goals. To create a business strategy, you look at these shortfalls, think about what you can do to improve the likelihood of meeting those goals, and examine how the strategy fits into your existing plans.

The trick is finding the best way to implement your strategy while causing as little interruption to your ongoing company operations as possible. There are a number of ways to make implementing a business strategy easier:

Engaging in active planning. If you don’t want implementation of your new business strategy to move along at a crawl and negatively impact your bottom line, it’s important that both company leaders and managers create step-by-step plans. You want to keep these plans active by executing each step of the plan and monitoring progress to make sure that you receive positive results at each point along the way. This will tell you that things are moving in the right direction so that you don’t have to backtrack— costing your business valuable time and money.

Working within the organizational structure. Just like the military has a chain of command, so do good companies. If you step outside of that chain of command, there’s a strong likelihood that you will disrupt the normal flow of business and cause confusion. When you implement new business strategies, you need to ensure that it is done in such a way that every department is given tasks and responsibilities that are clearly defined and understood by their immediate superiors. This way those superiors can promote the new initiative and ensure that everything is implemented correctly and completely.

Utilizing the annual planning process. Every company conducts an annual review of its goals, policies, and operations to ensure that each department is meeting their goals. This is a great time to implement new business strategies because your accountants will be creating the budgets for the next year, so they have time to tweak them based on changes in tactics. It also lets department managers introduce the new procedures in conjunction with budgetary differences and new marketplace realities.

Getting reports. Any changes in business strategy should be accompanied by a monitoring process so that you can see that your new plans and procedures are actually going according to plan. Set it up so that your management team (and possibly other select employees appointed by you) sends reports on the progress of the implementation to the executive team at pre-set times. For example, you can receive updates on a weekly or a monthly basis so you know everything is going smoothly.

Have function follow form. Unless you notice serious problems with the business that require a complete overhaul, your goal in creating an effective business strategy should be to use the resources you already have to maximize productivity and profitability. What this means, in a nutshell, is that you have to work within the confines of the existing departments and processes whenever possible and try to get them working as efficiently as possible before considering bigger changes that can be incredibly costly.

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Aileen Pablo is a Filipina business and finance blogger. She works at Open Colleges, one of the pioneers of Online education in Australia and one of the leading providers of diploma of management and small business courses. If you want to feature her on your blog, drop a line at aileen (at) oc.edu.au.