Strategic planning involves creating a guide your business can use to start and operate a successful and profitable business. According to Planware.org and The World Bank, the strategic planning process is a multi-step process. The strategic planning process includes gaining buy-in from all of the levels of the organization, creating vision, establishing a mission, setting objectives, planning strategies and programs to implement.

Gaining Buy-in

Strategic planning typically includes the involvement of the key personnel in your company. Small business strategic planning includes the owner(s) and managers of each area of the company such as finance, marketing and operations. In some cases, one person plays more than one role, but the idea is to being all of the key employees together so that the strategic planning process has input from all of the different angles of the business. This may occur in a meeting where an explanation of the strategic planning process and the role each employee plays in the process occurs.

Vision

The first step in strategic planning is creating a vision for the business. A vision is a description on where the company is today, as well as where it will be in one, two, three and five years from now. Planware.org says you should create the vision for your business by writing it in a way that a stranger that doesn’t know anything about your business can read the company vision and immediately understand elements of the business such as its products or services, the markets it serves, customers, processes, location and staffing.

Mission

The next step in strategic planning is to create the company mission. The mission explains the purpose of the business. While the vision is a description that paints a picture of the business, the mission is typically a one to three sentence statement including what the business does, the primary products or services and primary customers. For example, a software company mission statement may read, “X Corp. designs, develops, assembles and markets systems for data base management. These systems integrate its proprietary operating system software with hardware supplied by major manufacturers, and are sold to small, medium and large-sized companies for a range of business applications. Its systems are distinguished by a sophisticated operating system, which permits use without trained data-processing personnel.”

Objectives

Next, you need to plan the short-term and long-term objectives of the company. Most businesses have an underlying objective to turn a profit, but other objectives you can set in your strategic plan may include coverage of growth, technology pr expansion into new markets.

Strategies

The strategies are specific actions or steps the business employees need to take to achieve the vision, mission and objectives of the company. The strategy portion of a strategic plan provides the most details because it lists and describes the tasks and actions you need to complete to achieve the objectives set. For example, if the objective is to expand into the Mom-to-be market in your local community, some of the strategies may include placing print ads in local parenting magazines and attending daycare and pre-school orientation sessions for parents as a guest speaker in order to reach the members of the new market.

Programs

The final step in strategic planning is to create the programs. Programs include information such as the resources you use to carry out your strategies and reach objectives. The programs area of strategic planning also includes timelines, budgets and performance targets or ways to measure your ability to accomplish your business objectives.