How to Dominate Your Market…

Poor strategic planning is worse than no strategic planning.

It can be a big waste of time and money. Even worse, it can lead to disaster. Avoid all this with Simplified Strategic Planning - a proven process to focus for superior performance without straining your resources.

Whether you've been doing strategic planning for years or starting from scratch, you can acquire a streamlined process for developing and implementing your strategy. In four days, you will have learned this time-tested methodology, which has produced outstanding results for thousands of companies from a wide variety of business types.

Take a Look at What You’ll Discover during This Hard-Hitting, Three-Day Workshop

Why Most Companies Fail at Strategic Planning

• Why strategic planning requires a big-picture approach, rather than a single "magic bullet" solution
• How to craft a strategy that is thorough, yet simple

How to Create a Great Strategic Team

• Why you should never plan by yourself
• Who should be on your team...and who must NOT be
• How to build team commitment
• Ways to pinpoint the best team leaders

How to Dominate Your Market

• Why you must define your market with laser-like focus when creating a strategic plan
• The right way to segment your market for maximum profits
• The #1 mistake most companies make when doing segmentation
• How to gain market share...no matter how tough the competition is

How to Get Information You Need

• Why the information you gather is critical to the success of your plan
• The hands-down best way to gather information
• Why you never want too much information...and how to know when you have enough
• The truth about who should gather information for you (hint: the answer may surprise you)

How to Measure Key Success Factors

• The key areas to measure that drive your business
• The accurate way to measure intangibles
• How to create a profitability analysis to uncover and enhance your best profit centers
• The one thing you must always measure to ensure the very survival of your company

How to Find Your Unique Strategic Competency

• Why every company must find its strategic competency and what to do if you can't find one
• The three elements of every strategic competency
• How to sustain your strategic competency
• The three specific tests that every strategic competency must pass

How to Make Good Assumptions

• How to avoid one of the biggest mistakes of strategic assumptions
• How to anticipate the turning points in a trend
• What to do when it's impossible to make a reasonable prediction
• The four steps to minimizing assumption errors
• How to prepare for the unexpected

How to Select and Exploit Your Best Opportunities

• How to avoid the dreaded "group think"
• How to use creative brainstorming to uncover breakthrough ideas
• How to stimulate creative thinking about opportunities
• The four criteria you should use to assess the viability of any new opportunity

How to Protect Your Company From Potential Threats

• The most important question your company must answer to anticipate any strategic threats
• The five steps you must take to minimize the impact of any significant strategic threat
• How to evaluate perceived threats to identify those with the greatest potential impact

How to Determine Your Strategic Focus

• The six options for your company's strategic focus
• How to align your strategic focus with your strategic competencies
• The four key factors of market attractiveness
• The seven key characteristics of your competitive position
• The five core business strategies
• How to select the best strategy for each market segment
• The four options for your competitive strategy
• How to select a competitive strategy for each market segment

How to Get From Where You Are To Where You Want to Be

• How to set measurable, specific and achievable strategic objectives
• How to achieve 80% to 90% of your strategic objectives (most company achieve only about 30% of their objectives)

How to Best Allocate Your Resources To Meet Your Objectives

• How to determine resource needs and availability
• How to find the money and the time to carry out your strategic plans

How to Most Effectively Use Your Strategic Plan

• Why the planning process produces better results each time you use it
• How to use your daily behavior to communicate your plan throughout the company
• When to update your plan
• How often to monitor your progress

Armed with Simplified Strategic Planning, You Will...

1. Sharply focus your efforts on what is most important to your future success.
2. Improve tomorrow's results through efficient and effective strategic management.
3. Achieve your highest potential.
4. Take control of your destiny by establishing a lean, effective strategy process that fits your business.
5. Reach and stretch for higher levels of attainment.
6. Identify and resolve your toughest strategic issues.
7. Translate the company vision into personal involvement and alignment for your employees.
8. Generate motivation enthusiasm and commitment.
9. Accomplish all of this without interfering with the conduct of your business.
10. Achieve up to 90% of your strategic objectives.
11. Revitalize your company.
12. Grow your profits and company value.

FAQ

JUST EXACTLY WHAT IS STRATEGIC PLANNING?

"Strategy" is the leadership's sense of vision as to the overall course and direction of any endeavor or enterprise, be it war, government, a profit-seeking business, a non-profit organization, sports, one's personal or one's family life.

The term "strategic planning" refers to a coordinated and systematic process for developing a plan for the overall course and direction of the endeavor or enterprise for the purpose of optimizing future potential.

For a profit-making business this will involve questions as to "what shall we sell", "to whom shall we sell it" and "how shall we beat or avoid competition?" It may well involve other questions, such as; ownership and capital structure.

The central purpose of this process is to assure that the course and direction is well-thought-out, sound and appropriate and to assure that the limited resources of the enterprise (time and capital) are sharply focused in support of that course and direction. The process encompasses both strategy formulation and implementation.

DOES EVERY COMPANY NEED A STRATEGIC PLAN?

Every endeavor or enterprise already has a course and direction( aka strategy). These range from some vague sense of the desires of the owner to massive, overly sophisticated master plans. That strategy may be anything from abysmal to near perfection. It may be carefully thought out or driven by tactics.

Even formally planned strategy can be terribly flawed. So the real question is not whether every company needs a strategy, but rather whether the company's strategy needs to be well-thought-out, sound, appropriate and do-able. The answer is self-evident because if you don't lay out thoughtful course and direction for your company, events will dictate one for you.

WE ARE HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL ALREADY: WHY SHOULD WE PLAN?

Success is strong evidence that a company has had a sound and appropriate strategy. Note the past tense. There is absolutely no guarantee that yesterday's sound and appropriate strategy will continue to be successful in the future. Indeed, there is great danger in assuming so without adequate study

CAN A SMALLER COMPANY AFFORD THE TIME FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING?

Experience shows that the top management team will devote approximately 2-4% of its time to SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC PLANNING. In reality, structured strategic planning is not something more to do, but rather a better way of doing something already being done.

Indeed, in the long run it is a net time saver. It should be acknowledged that there is a danger of strategic planning becoming a time trap. Avoiding that trap is one of the fundamental purposes of SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC PLANNING.

WHY PLAN IN A WORLD THAT IS HIGHLY UNCERTAIN?

There is sometimes the feeling that forward planning is futile because it will be overwhelmed by unanticipated events and developments. Uncertainty is, indeed, a major problem in forward planning. However, to conclude that the best way to deal with the problem is to not plan is an ostrich-like response. To the contrary, the greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for good strategic planning.

HOW CAN WE BE CONFIDENT THAT OUR PLANNING WILL BE SUCCESSFUL?

Even in the presence of a structured strategic planning process, it is quite possible to formulate unsound, inappropriate strategy and/or to fail at implementation. There are many pitfalls. Above all, much of what is popularly "known" about strategic planning is just plain wrong.

What is required is a sound approach, management commitment and good planning leadership. One of the best first steps toward acquiring these prerequisites is to attend our seminar on SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC PLANNING FOR SMALL TO MID-SIZED COMPANIES.

This seminar lays out a streamlined, yet thorough, approach to strategic planning and implementation. It demonstrates a variety of techniques for obtaining management commitment. And it details the necessary attributes of good planning leadership. Following the proven methodology presented in this seminar will save both time and money. It will make the process easier (though not easy). And it will help you avoid the pitfalls.

HOW MUCH TIME WILL IT TAKE?

Strategic Planning can take a much or as little time as you want to devote to it. Typically, a company should devote 2-4% of top management time annually to the creation and monitoring of the strategic plan.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND THE SEMINAR?

This seminar is intended for top level management from independent companies and subsidiary operating units of large companies. It will benefit those who want to improve tomorrow's results by initiating strategic planning and those who want to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their existing planning process. Providers of a wide variety of goods and services - both industrial and consumer - have profited from this program.

THE SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS - HOW IT WORKS

There is no denying that strategic planning involves complex issues. But finding your course and direction doesn't have to be complicated.

Any strategic planning process involves digesting information and some fairly difficult analysis. Good strategic planning should be simplified, not simplistic.

The Three Key Questions

The Simplified Strategic Planning process is a step-by-step roadmap for answering the questions at the heart of the matter. The three key questions:

• What are you going to sell?
• Who are your customers?
• How can you beat or avoid the competition

The first two questions define the breadth, scope and focus of your business. First you must decide what you will do or will not do, and then you must decide who you will serve in the marketplace. These questions help you determine an appropriate focus.

We have found that many companies do not want to be focused and seem to go out of their way to avoid narrowing things down. The leaders of such companies usually can't stand the idea of not pursuing a sale. Often, when asked the question, What are you going to sell? such leaders answer "Everything we can." That's not focus. That's a pursue-everything approach - that person will also answer "Everyone we can," to the question, Who are you going to sell to? The problem to the two answers, of course, is that there is a third question and that question defines what are your resources. If you are trying to sell everything you can to everyone you can, you will need an awful lot of resources.

It's that third question that brings out a sense of realism in your strategic plan. When you get into the third question and begin examining your competencies, strengths, capabilities and infrastructure, you will really understand the importance of focus. You cannot profitably sell everything you can to everyone you can. Instead, you need to focus on applying specific capabilities to target markets. This will allow you to use your resources to your advantage instead of just using them up.

These questions are the heart of the Simplified Strategic Planning model because at each step along the way you will be working towards answering them. As you do you will learn and grow. And as you learn and grow, you will create a well-considered plan. In the end, you will have a strategy that works and gives specific answers those three questions.

Simplified Strategic Planning process structure

At the broadest level, the Simplified Strategic Planning process is a series of structured meetings in which you start by gathering some basic data and facts about your external and internal situation. Then, you try and build a consensus about some assumptions for the future, including opportunities, threats and scenarios. After you've researched the necessary facts and developed assumptions, you sit down and review it with your team and make sure everyone understands it and agrees with it. This is a central part of any strategic planning methodology because this information shapes all further discussion about strategy.

You will discuss this information and talk about its implications for your company's strategy. Then you will identify some issues that affect strategy. You will also consider how you might shoot yourselves in the foot. From there, you will go on to develop your strategy (course and direction). Then you define goals and objectives and get into the questions of:

• How do we get there?
• How much is it going to cost?
• When do we arrive?
• Who is responsible?

The Simplified Strategic Planning process covers nine items in three meetings. The first meeting is two days, the second is three days and the third meeting is two days and you will cover:

• Gather information
• Assess capabilities
• Make assumptions
• Make strategic assessments of present and potential market segments
• Develop core business strategy, competitive strategy, development strategy and financial strategy
• Establish goals and objectives
• Develop action plans to turn your objectives into results
• Finalize action plans after considering resource requirements and availability
• Schedule reviews of developments, progress and performance.

The point of the Simplified Strategic Planning process is to make the plan manageable. If you want to create a beautifully-bound 700-page bookend that everyone has and no one uses, you'll probably need a lot more meetings (just to design the cover). But if you want to create a plan - a real, workable plan that everyone can relate to quickly, - the Simplified Strategic Planning process is for you.

1. It starts with situation analysis - understanding your current situation and what your assumptions might be going forward.
2. Then there is strategy formulation - making decisions based on those inputs.
3. Finally, there is implementation planning - taking your decisions and driving them home in the organization to get results.

Remember the whole reason to do this is to get results. Implementation must be specific because when it is not it is invariably lackluster. The Simplified Strategic Planning process leads to specific implementation of a strategy. Dream it and then do it. That's how it works.

In total, the Simplified Strategic Planning process works out to about seven days of meetings, spread out over twelve weeks so that it won't interfere with your day-to-day business.

Sound Strategy + Effective Implementation = Solid Success

At the end of the Simplified Strategic Planning process, you end up with action plans that support your objectives. You allocate money though budgets, and you allocate time through time worksheets, and you have things being done on time and on budget because you have a strategy that fits the best information at your disposal. You should have in hand 6 to 10 action plans of things that specific individuals are going to do at specific times. They will take specific amounts of time and of money - numbers that everyone will agree are realistic commitments - and they will get things done.

100% No Questions Asked, Money-back Guarantee

Whether you've been using strategic planning for years or you're starting from scratch, we guarantee that this program will contain the most valuable information you will ever see on strategic planning. If you don't feel that this is, hands-down, the absolute best system for strategic planning, you will receive a prompt and courteous refund of your course fee.

Put this unique, practical, no-nonsense approach to strategic planning to work and achieve a winning strategy for your company. You will also achieve peace of mind - knowing that the future of your company is strong - with each passing day getting closer and closer to your ultimate picture of success.

There is no better time to do it than now.

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