Do It Now: Strategic Planning for Small Businesses and Solopreneurs
Strategic planning isn’t just something to cross off a to-do list. It’s really important for small businesses, solopreneurs, and solo agents for several reasons:
Sets the direction and your priorities: Provides you with a roadmap to follow. By defining your vision, mission, goals, and objectives, setting priorities, and determining the actions needed to achieve those goals, you can focus your efforts and resources in a way that makes sense for you and your business.
Maximizes resources: As a small business or solopreneur, you have limited resources, such as finances, time, and manpower. Strategic planning helps allocate those resources efficiently and effectively.
Identifies opportunities and threats: Assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Also, identify your positioning in the market and your USP (unique selling proposition) to make informed decisions about how to compete and grow.
Improves decision-making: Brainstorm the pros and cons as well as different options to make informed decisions about the future direction of your business.
Enhances communication: Facilitates communication and collaboration among team members by ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goals.
Increases accountability: Measure your progress and determine whether or not goals are being met.
Don’t skip it, and don’t treat it as a pesky exercise to check off your end-of-the-year list of things to do. Strategic planning should be non-negotiable in your business—it’ll help to provide direction and clarity, maximize limited resources, identify opportunities and threats, improve decision-making, enhance communication within your Team, and create accountability. And it can be done at any time, so if you haven’t recently sat down to do your strategic planning, now is a great time to start!