Hi, and welcome back to veterans smarter strategic planning for small business owners and solo entrepreneurs. In this session, we're going to talk about what a strategic plan is, who should be involved in the exercise and the timing of your plan and how it differs from a business plan. So your strategic planning exercise or the result of it, your plan is going to be developed through an exercise where whereby you identify long and short long or short term business and financial goals and through identifying the activities that you will need to conduct to achieve those goals. It's also going to help you gauge what your organization is about currently, what you do, what products and or services that you offer in the marketplace and how you're going to deliver those. And of course, why you do what you do. It's focused is meant to help you optimize your future potential by identifying what you have and what you don't have, and what you need to work on to move forward.

So, in terms of the scale of the exercise, it's going to vary depending on the size of your organization and your needs, your business needs. Your resulting report is going to allow you to better visualize your way forward. So you can monitor your progress, your productivity, your feasibility of your plan, and how you intend on delivering You know what, what you've set out in front of you. That way you can and also you want to be able to update or enhance your methods and operations as needed. it's beneficial for any any or any kind of business, whether you're big or small. In particular, I think small business owners and solo entrepreneurs will benefit from this.

If you want to Introduce and or maintain structure and organization into your business. It's, it's it's always good to have a plan in place. And this is what's actually going to serve as your map to success in terms of timing, when to do a strategic planning exercise? Well, if you're starting a new business, if you have a new product or service that you want to introduce and market, it, maybe you know some business environments change like laws and policies and practices, you want to make sure that you are up to date on those and that you incorporate any kind of legislation or laws into your plan accordingly. And of course, if you've never done one, well then it's always a good a good idea to put one in place as my accountability partner and I did not so very long ago actually. By having a strategic plan, it creates conditions for a system that's going to help you to deliver successful outcomes to your you know, to your future goals and aspirations.

When To conduct one Well, I would recommend and suggest, at least at the very least once every year, and of course, when you know something changes or the need arises for improvement, then of course, you're going to you can revisit at any time because even even a failure may necessitate review of a strategic plan for, you know, just one portion of your of your activities, even you know, and how it differs from a business plan is that a business plan is much broader in scope in terms of the information and content that it shares. It has where a business plan has a, a contains a budget, a marketing plan, operations plan. It also shares revenue generating estimates and the justification for those just those estimates, right. It usually identifies where you anticipate those potential sources for revenue where they're going to come from, and also provides information about your place in the marketplace.

And the value that you deliver. This kind of a document serves more as a presentation or justification piece for a business that's seeking startup capital or financial support or alone of some kind, right? It's it's a justification piece really, whereby a strategic plan puts the emphasis on your action plan. So to help you move forward, and reach your objectives and milestones identify resources or lack thereof. So you can carry out the identified projects and tasks tasks that you've you've uncovered through the exercise. So who should be involved in this type of exercise?

Well, if it's a large corporation, of course, it's normally the CEO that's going to head up the you know, the entire thing for a small business while the owner would headed up and any any, you know, team Team heads like if you had a marketing or a head of your SEO plan or something like that, those heads of your various little departments and divisions are going to lead the exercise alongside of their staff and their team, everybody's input is is is important to the success of this, you know, of this exercise and by everybody being involved and it helps everybody to understand their part in helping carry out the activities and you know, gain a better understanding of actually the activities and the tasks that are involved. And then you know, how everybody plays a crucial and integral part in contributing to the success of your plan overall, for solo entrepreneurs because you know, we wear all the hats then it's up to us to sit down and identify our activities and you know, break them down into the various various subject matter, etc, I would recommend or suggest that you also get a support or assistance from an accountability partner, or a trusted colleague or business coach to do just to work through this activity because it also it always helps to have somebody else that you can seek or get clarity from, and to help you kind of define your ideas and get them get them out of your head onto paper kind of thing, right?

So that you it helps you you know, reach a more positive outcome. So you will find more details on this subject in the guide that's been provided. I hope you will, you know, what you should be using and I actually could to conduct your, your, your overall exercise. In the next session, we're going to move right along to your class project, actually. And that is about your mission and vision statements. Now, you might be wondering, how come we're not doing this Should the strategic planning exercise itself as the class project?

Well, it's because that's a fairly lengthy and involved task and exercise. And besides that the results in your report May, you know, may have confidential business information that not every business owner is comfortable or you know, wishes to share with others. And that's completely understandable. But you should know actually, that the vision and mission statements are integral to even carrying out your business. And so that's why it's essential to get these this in place before you even move forward. So that's what we're going to talk about in the next video.

The next session, I'll be going over the class project a little bit and then you'll be off and running for that. So with that, I'll see you on the other side.