(If you’ve been following our weekly discussions, you can dive right in here. But if you haven’t read last week’s discussion, go back and read it before tackling this week’s message.
Last week we left off here: “Your vision of success was embedded in your psyche long before you realized it. Formal strategic planning is nothing more than the process of recognizing the success you envision and writing a detailed plan to get you and your company there.” (I neglected to mention last week that this is a CFMA quote”)
The Model
Start-up contractors are usually unconsciously emulating successful contractors they have experienced or are currently competing with that serve as models of their own success. This mental model is not a dream. It is a concrete mental picture of a real company or companies that contractors might admire and are working to emulate.
The Plan
Often you want your mature company to resemble your most successful competitor. Strategic business planning starts with this mental picture. Strategic planning is not a theoretical exercise. A written strategic plan is a roadmap (a guide) for the journey your present company must undertake to succeed on a par with the model you have in mind. A strategic plan starts with the financial, cultural, and organizational qualities that your most successful competitors display, then figure out the steps your company must take to mirror the successful competitor you are modeling. After you figure out where you want to go, you conceive of a way to get there.
A Company that Fails to Plan – Plans to Fail
Strategy unlinked to execution is, in essence, wishful thinking. Most startup construction companies across the country are engaged in wishful thinking and are surprised when the wish doesn’t materialize. Just because you know what success looks like, doesn’t mean that you can replicate it. If your strategy is to build your company in the image of a successful competitor, you must execute a carefully thought-out plan that turns wishful thinking into hard reality.
Executing a Strategic Plan
If you want your company to achieve your goal, you must take the following actions.
- Modeling – gather data about your model company’s financial condition, organizational behavior, market position, capital structure, and legal posture. The confluence of these individual factors morphs into the model that is the concrete goal you have for your company.
- Break Strategy into Tactics – The plan to achieve the goal must first be parsed into tactics. In short, if you want your company to achieve the success you envision, you whole company must do something about it. If your goal only resides in your mind, no one will do anything to drive the company along the desired path. It won’t happen without a methodical way to turn strategy into tactics. Your original goal often gets lost in the day-to-day work. A strategic plan that is first imagined, must then be managed, tracked, and executed across the entire construction enterprise.
- Leadership – You create the vision, but then you must guide your people to design and develop solutions that will achieve the strategic goals. In other words, your vision of success is not prescriptive; rather, it describes a required outcome and empowers the organization to find the best way there.
- Buy-In – Rather than a reference document with a wish list of strategic goals, your strategic plan should be tied to detailed roadmaps for all concerned department heads which translate strategy statements into quantitative plans with attendant rewards. In this way, strategic roadmaps result in enterprisewide engagement and a sense of urgency for all to help make a common dream come true.
An Achievable Strategic Plan
1. Clear and consistent prioritization – To enable real and successful strategic execution, leaders must tie their strategic plan to individual department roadmaps. This links your priorities to executive sponsorship and promotes a top-down, strategic view, eliminating the bottom-up approach that encourages the justification of non-strategic work.
2. Strategic roadmaps – What may be a clear goal in the mind of the leader is often a vague dream in the minds of the people in the company who are required to execute the plan. Each department must be informed with a clear and detailed strategic roadmap.
3. The enabling of agile execution – Executing strategy often takes collaboration and expertise from multiple areas across the organization. If everyone is working on the same plan with different skill sets, diverse efforts will further a unified corporate goal.
4. Fighting off distractions – Disruptions are everywhere. We all face them every day and in various forms. New regulations, competitor surprises, supply chain upsets: large and small, these interruptions encourage detours from the strategic roadmap. It’s our natural tendency to do those things first that we know we can resolve immediately. This usually leads to a complete dissolution of strategic intent to the point that companies often forget where they were intending to go in the first place.
Next week we talk about MBO. Tune in to solve that riddle.
For more information on Strategic Plans, read more here: PLANS
For a broader view on business model’s, read more here: MODELS
To receive the free weekly Construction Messages, ask questions, or make comments contact me at research@simplarfoundation.org. Please circulate this widely. It will benefit your constituents. This research is continuous and includes new information weekly as it becomes available. Thank you.
