Achieving your business vision

What ambitions do you have for your business? How do you perceive its progress into the future? Do you know how you’ll translate this vision into a positive business strategy with clearly defined goals?

As a business leader, you’ll probably have a basic business plan that shows how you’ll enhance company performance and achieve further growth. This plan, or road map, will include some detailed figures, sales projections, key objectives and deadlines. These are all critical contributors to your overall business vision, but achieving your goals isn’t just about the numbers. You also need to take into account the practicalities of your company’s business behaviours and its day-to-day activities.

This isn’t as complicated as it might sound. It simply requires you to adopt a different approach to your business planning. Our three-step guidelines will help you break the process down into smaller stages:

Step 1 : Planning

– Have you precisely defined your vision?

– Do you know where you want to end up?

– Have you envisaged how you’re going to get there?

You’ll get the best results from this approach when you answer these questions honestly, accurately and in detail. Starting out with candid objectivity will help to define your business behaviours and inspire employee commitment. It determines the way your company and its members conduct themselves and how you make important decisions. It also sets up a template for how the company interacts with its customers.

Your vision is the foundation of your business strategy. You should be focused firmly on the future, and for this you must be challenging, inspiring and purpose driven.

Step 2 : Implementation

Once you’ve established a clear vision of your business future, you need to act on your ideas. You’ll want to put your business strategy into effect and draw up your long-term business plan. You should focus on your stated goals to generate some key initial objectives. These should, wherever possible, be measurable, so you can track your progress.

Don’t expect instant results. These processes take time and care: you’ll need to be pragmatic and prioritise. You’ll have to clarify the decisions you need to make and determine what resources will be required to achieve your objectives. In these early stages of the planning process, it’s also important that you establish a shared strategy. You should collaborate closely with key stakeholders and business colleagues.

Step 3 : Re-evaluation

Once you’ve set out your plans in detail, you should go over them again to ensure that your business vision accomplishes your long-term goals. At this point, you should take these common critical questions into account:

1. What is your product or service?

2. Where and how will you sell it?

3. What is your unique selling point?

4. What sales opportunities do you have and how will you implement them?

5. Is this sales plan supported by your marketing strategy?

6. What is your company’s culture and employee structure?

7. What capital and other resources will you need?

8. How do your financials underpin your business goals?

This may all sound scary and the process is sometimes daunting. However, we have long experience of working with businesses to develop their strategy. We can help you break the overall vision down into small, manageable actions, so that you can more easily move your business forward.

Our team at BHP Consulting have all successfully run businesses, and we understand that every business is unique. Our practical approach to supporting our clients enables us to share our real world experience to positively impact on the performance of your business. To arrange a call or an exploratory face-to-face meeting, please click here