Small business owners are known to wear many hats, the operational hat, sales hat, marketing hat and so on. This has lead to people believing that small business are not capable of wearing hats such as the strategy hat. The problem is aggravated by lack of knowledge on strategy and the fact that it is placed on a pedestal. So many believe small business can’t strategise.
THIS IS A MYTH, all small business can strategise. All they need is to understand what strategy is using the KISS principle. With this knowledge strategy becomes possible for the small business. So, here is the break down of strategy for any sized business.
There are seven small stages to creating and implementing a strategy.
1) Information: Gather information on customers, competitors, your environment or the areas of interest or potential. Also gather information on the firm’s skills, resources and current activities (both on what is working and non working).
2) Analysis: Examine the information gather for opportunities for you to explore or to expand your business. Also look for things that could impact the firm negatively or threats. Examine the information on your firm for areas of weakness and also strengths.
3) Options: Generate ideas on what you can do next. How can you overcome weakness? What can to do with your strengths? Can your strengths help to overcome weakness? What do you want to do next? How can you pursue the opportunities available? What can you do to prevent the threats from impacting your business? Can your strengths be used to nullify threats or take advantage of opportunities? What improvements can you make?
Do not be afraid to flesh the ideas out by writing a paragraph or so on them, it will help you decide on their viability.
4) Decision making: Decide which of the idea you would like to pursue.
5) Plan: Write a list of what you have to do to make it happen and place it in order of priority. It would be good if you add a time limit to each item on the list, it is essential in cases where there is a event at a specific time that needs to be incorporated.
6) Follow the plan: Start doing the things on the list generated in step 5.
7) Review and adjust: As you go along problems will be encountered and new information will be gathered. Use this knowledge to review and adjust the plan.
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011, 7:23 am | 
Management, Marketing | 
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