Elevate Your Business in 2024: How to Create 2024 Strategic Plans for your Small Business

Calling All Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners!

2024 is knocking on our door, so it’s time to gear up for some serious business magic! At ASC, we're all about taking businesses from zero to 1, and growing beyond!

Something that we've always stressed as important for all small businesses and growing businesses is the importance of creating, maintaining, and executing strategies in your business.

Why Bother?

If it's not broke, don't fix it... Right?

Have you ever felt stuck in the business mud? Or, that your business just isn't growing as fast, or how, you want it to?

That's one of the best indications that you need new strategies!

Creating a strategy for your business is a lot like a renovation. You're not totally overhauling, but you're building off of the strong foundation you already have in order to build something better.

And, at the end of the day if you're not continuously improving, chances are you're falling behind.

That's why a strategy is so important.

In this blog, we cover how you can create a 2024 strategic plan for your small business.

Creating your 2024 Strategic Plan

There's a few things involved in creating a 2024 strategy plan. In short, here's what you need to be aware of when creating a strategic plan:

1. Organizational Involvement

2. Setting Operational and Financial Targets

3. Setting Operational and Financial KPIs (performance metrics)

4. Defining Success for People and Performance

5. Ensuring Alignment

6. Documentation and Involvement

7. Find your North Star

Let's dive into each of these shortcuts to creating a successful strategic plan.

Organizational Involvement

We understand that in the eyes of many business owners and entrepreneurs, the long-term strategy and direction of the business is their role.

And, while we're not disagreeing with you, we have seen time and time again that the most successful business strategies are created with open involvement of the whole company.

We're not saying that everybody needs to pitch in on the strategy (although, for businesses with very few staff, we actually do recommend this). However, we do suggest that different individuals from different areas of the business (including both management and individual contributors) are involved in the creation of a strategy.

The reason we suggest this, and include this as the first point is that, as the owner you may not have all the answers, or know what happens on a day-to-day basis.

So, having organizational involvement from all areas and levels ensures that your 2024 strategy has the entire business in mind, and more organically lead the business to success.

Setting Operational and Financial Targets

One of the first (and, likely most important) pieces of a successful strategy is setting targets.

After all, how can you know what you're going to do, if you don't know where you're going?

We encourage businesses to follow a method of target-setting that works for them. Whether this is setting quantifiable SMART goals, using backcasting, creating quarterly goals and milestones, or any combination of those... It's important that you set goals that make sense for your business.

The point of these targets is to make sure that you have something that you can work towards next year.

Keep in mind that these targets should be for both the finances and operations in the business. Some common targets that we help businesses set include:

• Grow monthly, quarterly, or annual revenue by XX%

• Increase retention (or, decrease turnover) by XX%

• Achieve $XX in monthly revenue

• Hire XX more staff

• Lower costs in XX department by XX%

• Introduce a new product or service

There are a few important things to remember when setting goals. If you follow the SMART goals, then this may sound familiar, but what we tell our clients is to make sure your goals:

ARE SPECIFIC

(have specific, measurable benchmarks attached to them)

HAVE A DEADLINE

(the more specific, the better)

BRING VALUE TO THE COMPANY

(not just busy work, or vanity metrics to make you look good)

Defining Success for people and Performance

Along with setting goals for the year (month, or quarter), it's important that business owners, managers, and even individual contributors define what success looks like for them, their role, and the company.

For example, if the company's goal is to keep voluntary turnover under 10% in 2024, success will look very different for different groups and people in the company.

An individual contributor may have little involvement but a high impact on this goal, so success could be more intangible, and simply be "to make the office a more welcoming place for people".

Success to the HR manager may be defined by creating a better onboarding and training plan, whereas success for the company owner may be defined as speaking with individuals in the company on a more personal basis more frequently.

Likewise, success for a team leader or executive may be to focus more on company culture, and making the office a better place to work.

It's important for not only business owners, but everyone in a company to define what individual success looks like for them when aligning themselves to an organizational strategy and goal for 2024.

Ensuring Alignment with the Strategic Plan

On the topic of alignment, it is important for business owners to ensure that there is cultural alignment when creating a 2024 strategic plan.

This means that people, roles, and departments should (at some level) align with the strategic plan.

We understand that not everybody may agree with the strategic plan, but it's important to achieve alignment over agreement. Work with people on an individual basis who may not agree with the strategy, to find alignment in their day-to-day role in a way that they agree with, and that still works towards the goals of the company.

Beyond these one-offs, finding alignment ensures that everyone is 'rowing the boat in the same direction', and that achieving a goal will be much more achievable.

Think of it this way... If you have 20 people working together on a single goal, you'll be able to achieve (if not exceed) that goal much faster than if you have a team of 3 or 4 executives working on it alone.

Host Strategy Sessions

In order to achieve this alignment we speak so highly of, we don't recommend that you send a company wide email.

Instead host a Strategy Session with key stakeholders, individual contributors, or (if space allows) the whole company.

Meet more than once with different groups to define what a strategy will be, who it will impact, how it will be achieved, what the goals are, when it will take place and rollout, how you're going to do it, and why the company is rolling out this new strategy.

Notice what we did there?

We often recommend that company owners and executives, or really whoever the decision makers are, host around 2-3 strategy sessions, and a strategy presentation.

The strategy sessions should independently involve different groups in the company, which could be operations, sales, executives and management, human resources, finance, and other groups.

The strategy presentation should involve the whole company, and be a demonstration in transparency so everybody knows what's going on in 2024.

Documentation

One of the most important parts to creating, maintaining and executing a strategy is documenting the process.

Whether its a strategy session, goal creation, presentation, or a simple conversation, it's important to document the process of creating, executing, managing, and achieving a strategy.

Find your North Star

We'll leave you with this...

When creating a 2024 strategy, you need to find your North Star.

What is the North Star? Simply put, it's your goal. But simplified and broken down into its KPIs and milestones so you can track it every single day throughout the year.

We often recommend nominating an individual in the company as the "astronomer". It's a silly title that probably shouldn't go on their professional email, but it's a title that you can give someone who has involvement in nearly all areas of the company.

The role of the astronomer is to (on top of their current role), have an ear to the ground and an eye to the sky to manage this goal, and to steer the company in the right direction.

Ready to dive into the strategy game and have one of your own?

Well, coffee is on us. Literally. We're giving away coffee.

Businesses and business owners that book with us before the end of December get a free coffee gift card for booking a strategy planning consultation with ASC.

We look forward to chatting with you soon, and seeing you crush those 2024 goals.