Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Seeing the Signs: Why You Need This Book

Planning for the future is important, but very few businesses actually do it. Instead of listing the benefits of business planning and strategic planning (see Chapter 2 for those), I opted to include some warning signs that tell you whether you need a new strategy for your strategic planning process. So if any of the following statements apply to you, you need this book.

• Someone asks where your business will be in one year, and you don't have an answer. You ask your partners or management team the same question, and you hear wildly different answers.
• You have some idea where you want to go in the next year, but you don't have any idea what you're going to do to make next year a reality.
• Your company won't hit its revenue goals this year. Although many reasons may exist for the shortfall, you're not sure how to grow the top line.
• Your brochure, website, sales collateral, and so on have inconsistencies. You can't understand the content. More importantly, neither can anyone else. You find that when you explain your business to a potential client, you tell different stories about how you provide value.
• You're ignoring your competition. You don't know who your number-one competitor is and what it's doing, who its clients are, what products it offers, what its pricing is, or what its key message points are. When your customers ask you to explain why your company is different, you don't have a good response.
• Everything on your to-do list is a ...