Writing a Business Plan - Part 3 of a 4-Part Series

 Developing Your Strategies and Actions Plans

By Jeri T. Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist

For many clients, crafting their Strategies and Actions can be challenging. Sometimes it’s difficult to wrap your mind around how they fit into the business plan. The Vision, Mission, Values, and Objectives (goals) are pretty straight forward. The Strategies and Actions perhaps less so. But these are critically important to helping you actually achieve the objectives.

Strategies and Actions Connect the Dots

Think of your strategies and actions as the tasks you need to achieve by a certain date in order to complete an objective.

For example, let’s imagine you’re planning an event for a year from now. The objective might be: “raise $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025.”

To do this, you have several tasks that must be accomplished before the event takes place. Here are just a few things that have to happen:
1.    Select a location
2.    Determine the event theme
3.    Create a budget
4.    If there’s a silent auction, select items to auction
5.    If there’s a live auction, choose the auctioneer
6.    Select entertainment
7.    Choose a caterer
8.    Create and send invitations

Those 8 items are the strategies to be accomplished for the objective of raising $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025. Each strategy has its own due dates and set of actions that must be accomplished before that strategy is complete. As you start assigning due dates to the strategies, you may see that in order to accomplish one strategy, a prior one must be completed.

For example, selecting a location may require site visits to meet with the event director. The location may be a hotel or a clubhouse or a unique location like a museum or golf course. Until you identify the location and the cost to hold your event there, you can’t complete your budget, the third strategy on your list.

The same holds true for the event theme. That strategy may require a committee meeting to brainstorm ideas and research the costs associated with creating the ambiance you want – colors, decorations, attendee gifts, etc. Those costs will be added to the budget as part of the overall expense for producing the event.

Once you’ve determined all the costs associated with producing the event, you may find it necessary to offset those costs with sponsors. Even those have costs associated with them since sponsors expect special treatment such as free tickets, free drinks, gifts, etc. You will need to create different sponsorship levels with their own set of recognition and gifts depending on the amount of money being donated. In this situation, you have another set of strategies and actions tied to finding and securing sponsors.

All of these activities are the tasks that need to be accomplished in order to achieve the objective of raising $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025. These actions with their respective due dates drive your daily activities leading up to the event. They connect the dots between where you are today (planning the fundraiser) and achieving the end goal of raising $50,000.

If we continue with the same 1-3 year horizon we’ve used for the prior two blog articles, then you write your strategies as follows:

• Business building objective to accomplish by a future date, plus
• 8-10 strategies that describe how that objective will be done.
• Under each strategy are specific actions or tasks that must be completed to achieve that strategy.

Let’s use the fundraiser example from above.

The objective is to raise $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025

Strategy 1 is to find a location by September 30, 2024. The actions to accomplish that are:
•    Research venues
•    Make site visits to meet with event directors
•    Determine costs associated with preferred venue
•    Choose the best venue and date availability

Strategy 2 is to determine the event theme by October 31, 2024 Those actions might include:
•    Gather a committee to brainstorm themes
•    Choose colors, décor, and theme images
•    Determine costs associated with theme elements

Strategy 3 is to create an event budget by November 30, 2024. The actions tied to that might include:
•    Check with manager re budget allowance
•    List all costs associated with producing the event
•    Determine if sponsors/underwriters are needed
•    Determine ticket price and minimum attendance to cover costs
•    Set fundraising goals for auctions to offset event costs
•    Create an interim budget showing expenses, revenue, and potential net profit

That gives you an idea of how to write the strategies and actions (Part D on the template) to connect the dots between your current state (Part C) and your desired state (Part A) also known as your future vision.

If this scenario were real, you would include additional strategies and actions to carry you through the event, including a follow-up debrief that covers what went well, what didn’t, and whether or not you pulled off the event at or under budget.

If you have questions about crafting these, feel free to use this link to schedule a 15-to-30-minute no-obligation call.