Strategic Planning – Business Restructuring and Pivot

Strategic planning has long been a tool used by large corporations for business planning and growth. Most of the tools, processes, services and solutions that have been developed in this area have been geared towards large enterprises and therefore don’t scale or translate effectively for SMBs.
The principals of Chetanya have first hand experience with strategic planning for their own SMBs and have an inherent understanding of the right approach and tools that would deliver meaningful and measurable results.

Strategic planning for an SMB is the process of finding the soul of the company. Once you discover who you are as a company and define the boundaries of your current business (SWOT), the next step is two-fold,

  1. engage in an imagination exercise to reimagine your future company and conduct Gap analysis on it and
  2. conduct a TOWS analysis based on the SWOT and Gap analysis to discover how you can use your Strengths and Opportunities to overcome your weaknesses and threats while leveraging your strengths to realize your opportunities.

The critical ingredient to the strategic plan, as designed by Chetanya, is to find the intersection of

  • “what are you good at?”
  • “what are you passionate about?” and
  • “what are the economic drivers?”

The end result is a set of initiatives in the form of Strategies that are to be implemented.

The strategic implementation plan is then detailed in a ‘Stra-T-Act” plan. This is a tool designed by Chetanya that bridges the gap from a “Stra-T-egic” plan to a “T–Actical” plan by developing an “Act-ion” plan that can be monitored, adapted and executed. Quite often, once the Strategic Plan is completed, over time, it fizzles away because of a lack of clarity in integrating it into the tactical operation of the business in the form of an action plan with tangible deliverables and schedule. The Stra-T-Act plan document bridges this gap ensuring that the overall strategic plan gets implemented in bite-sized chunks and monitored, adapted and verified along the way.

Some strategic plans require a complete restructuring of the business including a pivot that changes or enhances the very nature of a business. Consider the case of 3M which leveraged its strengths and opportunities to pivot from being a mining company to dominating office supplies, medical products and other wide variety of products. Or, consider Amazon which started as a bookseller and is today one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world.

Chetanya will lead your SMB through a discovery process that will identify a business restructuring and pivot plan, if necessary, to help grow your business and secure its future.