Strategy Resources

 

Browse by Topic

 

Articles & Guides

Our articles section features in-depth features on strategic planning subjects. Please feel free to browse around.

  1. Church Planning Part 2: Elements of a Strategic Plan

    In the second part of our church planning series, Dr. Howard Olsen & Nancy Olsen will be advising how to find your strategic plan model through a step-by-step process of the elements of a strategic plan.

  2. Church Planning Part 1: Laying the Foundation for Planning

    In a two-part series, Dr. Howard Olsen and Nancy Olsen describe the details of creating and implementing strategy specifically for churches. Through this series of articles, churches can gain great insight on how executing strategy can work for their church.

  3. How to Write a Strategic Plan

    Knowing how you’ll reach your vision is the meat of your strategic plan, but it’s also the most time consuming. Not to oversimplify how to create a strategic plan, but by placing all the parts of a plan into three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces fit together. Each part has certain elements to show you how and where things fit it.

  4. Internal and External Analysis

    Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, here we focus on internal and external approaches, SWOTs, competitive analyses and market analyses. All these offer insight needed to properly begin setting goals and objectives within your strategic plan.

  5. Vision Statements

    Talk of being a visionary goes hand-in-hand with talk of leadership. So ask yourself: What will your business look like in 3 to 5 years? What new things do you intend to pursue? What do your future customer need to be satisfied?

  6. Mission Statements

    Mission statements define a company’s purpose. It is a single statement of why something or someone exists. It is like your North Star, which is not a place you go, it is a fixed point giving you perspective on where you are going.

  7. How Much are Your Customers Really Worth?

    Customer Loyalty provides remarkable value to a company. Beyond statistics of retention and referrals, how can loyalty be measured in long-term worth? Understanding ways to estimate the Lifetime Value of your loyal customers can help offer long-term perspective.

  8. Be a Purple Cow

    It is important to have a good understanding of where your company stands in the mind of the customer, otherwise known as the “position” your product/service has in the competitive marketplace. Are you positioned the way you want to be, or are you just a brown cow – invisible and boring?

  9. Make Your Marketing Pay Off

    Bring fundamental analysis into your strategic marketing efforts, by integrating ways into your campaigns to track your Return On Investments. Like any management function, managing your marketing requires proper process and measures to make sure your spending is hitting the mark.

  10. Outperform Your Competitors (Spanish)

    EL DESEMPEÑO SUPERIOR DE UNA COMPAÑÍA UNA MEJOR RELACIÓN CON LOS CLIENTES UNA VENTAJA COMPETITIVA La competición para obtener acceso a los bolsillos y al dinero de los consumidores es intensa y a consecuencia [...]

  11. Outperform Your Competitors

    If you want to out perform your competition and keep your customers coming back, implement one basic business strategy – focus on your market. This means taking customer focus to a higher level and having a company-wide strategy that is not only customer focused, but is also market focused.

  12. Three Ways to Growth

    Customer knowledge you already have is literally a hidden goldmine of profit that can grow your business and increase your company’s top line. It is this customer-focused information that will provide the foundation for generating more sales, retaining and cross-selling customers, and acquiring new customer business.

  13. Strengthening Your Strengths

    From a strategic perspective, you should not spend time itemizing the laundry list of everything your company does well. In fact, sometimes this can bog the planning process down. You want to identify the strengths that matter. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

  14. Checking Your Profit Margins or Start Making More Money

    Are you ready to make more money in your business? Who isn’t? The secret to making more money: Stop doing things that lose money. Now, before you roll your eyes, don’t overlook the simplicity of this statement.

  15. Building a Lasting Organization

    To endure the test of time for your company to be great, your competitive advantage needs to be sustainable. Why? Because most advantages can be duplicated within a period of time, and process improvements quickly follow. And everyone knows competing on price is never sustainable.

  16. Ten Things to Keep Your Strategic Plan from Hitting the Shelf

    More often than not, life and day-to-day operations take over a well-intentioned strategic plan implementation. Embed your strategic planning into daily operations and you begin to make strategy a habit instead of an event. Here are ten quick ways to keep your strategic plan from hitting the shelf and collecting dust.

  17. Where is Your Company Headed? How are You Going to Get There?

    A company’s strategic plan is the “game plan” management has for positioning the company in its chosen market arena, competing successfully, satisfying customers, and achieving good business performance. If you are part of the 90 percent that do not have a strategic plan, here’s how one can help give your company the direction you desire.

  18. Ten Common Causes of Business Failure

    Failure is a topic most of us would rather avoid. But ignoring obvious (and subtle) warning signs of business trouble is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the business survival statistics. From interviews and experiences of our business network, M3 Planning highlights ten causes of business failure.

  19. The Ten-Step, One-Day Strategic Plan

    A strategic plan does not have to be perfect or 100 percent complete: It is a living document after all. It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming or a monumental task. Just grab a few key people in your organization, turn off the phones and let’s get started.

  20. Strategy Books

    Our list of helpful references within the realm of Strategic Planning.

Next Page »