How To Create Your One Page Strategic Plan | LAYC 94

Hello, I'm Isabel Alexander, and I'm glad you're back here with me today

because recently I shared an episode on why small to medium sized enterprises,

SMEs, should have a strategic plan, why it's really important that they have

a strategic plan, and I got a lot of feedback and questions about that episode.

And they included "What about me?

I'm a solopreneur

and I'm all by myself."

And even

more frequently, "it was, okay, I understand what you're saying, Isabel,

that as a small business, we need to have a strategic plan, You didn't

really explain how to do that."

So that's what I want to do today.

I want to start a mini series of episodes explaining how to create a strategic plan

when you are deciding a solopreneur, or when you are a smaller business and you

don't have all the resources that larger organizations, all those fortune 100, 500,

1000 corporations that have staff that can put all that stuff together and gather

all the data and make it look pretty and format it and distribute it, or not for

profit organizations or clubs all those organizations have a strategic plan.

And that's why you, as a woman business owner, and whether you're

a solopreneur or you've got, half a dozen or 20 staff members, why does

it really pay you huge dividends?

to take the time and effort to learn how to do a strategic plan that works

for your business, the size of it, the number of people involved in carrying

out the plan, and how to have fun with it, and how you keep on, how you

start the rhythm and the continuity.

So I'm sharing In several episodes coming up, my own journey, how I learned no

longer to be intimidated by strategic planning, how I learned absolutely

I should have a strategic plan.

It's even more important than those really big corporations with all the double

commas and zeros in their bottom lines.

My inside tip for you it's all based on a book written by Verne Harnish, and of

course I'll include the details to that book in the show notes, called Mastering

the Rockefeller Habits, and I learned about this book when I hired a business

advisor, a business consultant, to come in and help me organize the chaos

and the unpredictability of my already then in the millions of dollars a year

sales business, so that I wasn't always running to see if we could keep it up.

That was the big thing.

Can I keep it up?

Can I plan my life?

Can I keep my promises to this team that they have a livelihood to look forward to?

And can I keep my promises to my customers and my suppliers?

Rather than you having to, today, dig deep and go find yourself a business

consultant, a business advisor, who is a right fit for you, I will give

you insights from my own experience on going from sort of kind of knowing

what I wanted to do to having a really elegant, beautiful, one page strategic

plan that guided us from hit and miss millions in sales to eight figure

multiple millions with a team that knew where we were going, knew their

part of it and everybody was on board and knew what their contribution was.

And I felt more calmness and more excitement and more enthusiasm

than I had for multiple years.

Do buy the book!

Guarantee, it will become one of your favorite reference books.

It talks all about the great habits of the ultra successful businessman, John D.

Rockefeller.

Thanks to Verne Harnish, he was able to capture those habits and best

practices and update them and make them relevant to us as business owners today.

Now, the book really is directed more towards, slightly larger businesses and

larger teams, but I have been able to adapt those best practices over the years.

I've used this methodology, the one page strategic plan, which truthfully

is two pages but it's okay, it's double sided printing, to help many clients,

many other women business owners get a plan, get a vision, and get a

systematic, step by step, measurable, celebrate ability plan for their company

that they could go year after year with, "Okay, this is working so well!

We're just going to keep refining it."

Over in the next couple of episodes, what I'm going to do

is go through each of the steps.

that are included in Verne Harnish's book about how you also can

create your own strategic plan.

You don't have to rush out and get the book now.

I know your to do list is already full.

You've got lots of plates spinning, but here's what we're going to do.

We're going to talk about what they've captured so concisely in this book and

that's establishing your priorities.

Yeah, yeah, yada, yada, yada.

That's what we all say, but In following this process, you crystallize what the

priorities are, get really clear on them, know how to measure them, and how

to really see that you are achieving not only the big goals, but the smaller goals,

that contribute to the overall plan.

It anchors you back into "Okay, we'll do this!", and there will be a flow, and

everyone who's involved in creating the plan, executing the plan, measuring the

plan, celebrating the plan, will know the rhythm, and they will know the pattern

to which their accountability comes up.

Having a plan, not only It gives you a structure, a framework to look backward

and learn from what you have accomplished and what worked and what didn't work

for you in your business and you've got the measurability aspects because you

have the numbers, you have the data but based on that You can look forward and

you can make some realistic projections.

I love the book in its entirety for the framework that it establishes for growth.

I have been able to, over decades, to modify, or let's say massage, the content

and the practices to make it work best for smaller businesses, smaller shops,

one person shops, or a small team.

So I'm looking forward to sharing all of that with you.

I hope that, in these conversations I will help you overcome any doubts that

you have about needing a strategic plan and remove any intimidation

or fear, reluctance about creating one and creating an honest one and

going through all of the steps.

That's my joy.

I've always said that my greatest.

reward, satisfaction as a business catalyst and as a transformation coach

for women business owners is being able to share not only what I have learned

over the past 50 ish years in business, running other people's businesses,

working for other entrepreneurs, and then ultimately starting my own

business and running that for 20 years.

And then going on to coach and be a catalyst, a CEO catalyst for

hundreds of other women entrepreneurs.

I love that I can share with you all what not to do, because I have

learned those lessons as well.

And one of the most important lessons here to underline is that I have learned that

you cannot have predictable, enjoyable success and rewards from your business.

If you don't have a plan.

Because as I've said before, if you don't know where you're

going, you won't get there.

So just recapping what we're going to talk about in creating a strategic plan that is

designed to work for your unique business.

We'll review the importance of understanding your

beliefs and your core values.

That comes before anything else because every single business decision that you

make, you can only live with it, support it, and grow with it, if it's aligned

with your values, because your values are the values that the company is built on.

That leads us then into figuring out the purpose of the business and the

mission description so that you can articulate very, very clearly what Your

purpose is, and what you stand for, who you support, what you're delivering.

We'll talk about big, hairy, audacious goals, BHAGs, and the importance of having

smaller and larger goals, and having long term and short term goals, and to

make sure that you're clear what they are and they fit into that purpose and

mission, and how we can measure those.

Then we'll break it down into, okay, understanding.

So we've got these higher level objectives, goals.

Now, what are the steps?

What are the many steps within each of those that are necessary?

And who?

and how they get accomplished

. And then the rhythm part is probably, that's kind of a secret sauce in

my mind, is having that cadence of staying informed, checking the numbers,

sharing the results, and celebrating with everybody who contributed.

And then, of course, underpinning all of that is figuring out how,

what are the important measurements that you're looking for.

Those are the ones that will tell it all, that will say,

yes, you're on the right track.

Those are called KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators.

Without going too much farther into the details of what we're going to talk about,

we'll also be talking about SWOT analysis.

If you haven't heard that term before, it's eons old but it's still relevant

to every single one of us today and it should be done on a regular basis.

So stay tuned, come back next episode and we'll start to build it out.

If you want to follow along with me, I'll give you some real

examples of what this all looks like so you can start to envision

how your strategic plan will work.

If you need more help with that, you want to have a conversation with me

about, "I'm not sure about that, or how could that possibly work for my

particular business situation and model."

Then reach out to me.

We can talk about that.

All you have to do if you live in the United States is text from your mobile

the word ENCORE, E N C O R E, to 33777.

Or, apply to have a conversation with me at URL www.

encore33777.

com.

All right, I'll be back to you soon.

I'm excited to share what I learned about strategic planning and how to make it

simple, fun, and incredibly effective!

Bye for now.