Giving your firm a New Year MOT

Jan 4 2010 Chris Simpson, Business Link

THE New Year is the perfect time to take a fresh look at your business and assess whether it is fit for the future.

Having a strong strategy in place is an essential business tool, and will help your company to stay on track throughout the year.

The purpose of strategic planning is to set your overall goals for your business and to develop a plan to achieve them.

It involves stepping back from your day-to-day operations and asking where your business is headed and what its priorities should be. For a growing business this is particularly important. Taking the decision actively to grow a business means embracing the risks that come with it. Spending time identifying exactly where you want to take your business – and how you will get there – should help you reduce and manage those risks. You can find out more about how a strategy will help you to grow your business at www.businesslink northeast.co.uk.

As a starting point, you will also need to start collecting and analysing a wide range of information about your business – both about how it operates internally and about how conditions are developing in your current and potential markets. Understanding this really is the key to producing a strategic plan that will help you thrive in 2010.

It is important that you involve others in your strategy planning. Take on board the opinions of other staff – key employees, accountants, department heads, board members - and those of external stakeholders, including customers, clients, advisors and consultants.

Try to find people who show the kind of analytical skills that successful strategic planning depends upon, a mix of creative thinkers and those with a solid grasp of operational detail.

There is no right or wrong way to plan the process of strategic planning, but be clear in advance about how you intend to proceed. Everyone involved should know what is expected of them and when.

The priority with strategic planning is to get the process right. It's also important to make sure you capture the results in a strategic planning document.

Visit www.businesslink.gov.uk/northeast or call 0845 600 9 006.

Chris Simpson of Business Link