Strategic business plan

It should be clear to you that making a business plan is vital for your venture to move forward and adapt to change. There are three main reasons why you should make one.

In case you are going to start a financing process. To organize and manage more accurately all aspects of your business. And in order to attract new partners and collaborators. Any type of company, in its beginning, must have a good business plan, which evolves along with it. The business plan that you make at the beginning of your enterprise is valid for one or two years, and later you have to adapt it to the new characteristics and strategies of the company.

When your company is already established and well rooted in the market, then you use another type of plan to adequately manage and carry out the administration of it. This type of plan is called a strategic plan, and is most commonly used by businesses that have been in business for some time and want to focus on growth. The strategic plan is a guide to the path the company should take over a time span of 3.5 or more years.

Main differences between a traditional and a strategic plan

There are key aspects that differentiate a traditional plan from a strategic plan. By this I do not mean that the two plans are completely different, but rather two sides of the same coin. Both are very useful and necessary in the development of any successful business.

Strategic

• The strategic plan is indispensable for the best management of the company's resources, such as money, time and employees, with the objective of increasing profits and recovering the initial investment.
• The time span used as a metric in this plan is longer, since its main utility is to create a better and more lasting competitive advantage.

Traditional

• The traditional plan is more necessary at the beginning of the incorporation of the company, for financing, investment or loan purposes.
• The time span measured by this type of plan is shorter, since what we want in this case is to forecast the potential viability of the company.

Aspects of the strategic plan

In this type of plan we are going to concentrate on aspects that differ slightly from the traditional plan. In this case we include many of the elements that we use in the initial plan such as the vision and mission and short-term objectives, but we must also include:

• SWOT analysis.

• The analysis of the current reality of the company.

• Long-term and annual objectives.

• The methods to achieve our objectives.

Questions to answer

To differentiate with more specificity our strategic plan we must answer the following questions:

• Where is my company at the moment? In the answer you must include the internal workings of your business, what are the methods of profit and the comparison with competitors.
• Where do you want to take your business? Here you should include the most ambitious goals for the future of the company. In addition to a prospective of your business in 3, 5 or 10 years. And how you can maintain and improve the focus and advantages over the competition.
• What actions do we need to take to get to where we want to be? In this section you should be as specific as possible. You should clearly state what changes you would need to make to achieve these objectives.

You must also delimit how to implement those changes and how we would restructure the organization of the company to achieve our goals in the time frame we set.

Here you can help yourself with strategies to diversify, new products or services that you want to include or new investment possibilities. The main characteristic that your prediction must have, is that it is based on reality, to be able to discern with better clarity the steps that we must take to reach our objectives.

Tools to make the plan

The strategic plan makes use of different tools that assist in the analysis to recognize more easily the external and internal mechanisms that play a priority role in the completion of our goals.

Some of the most commonly used tools are

• SWOT analysis: in this we break down the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats of our company.

• Stipple Analysis: in this we analyze more in depth the environment of our company.

• Socia