[Click Here to register for my Thursday Webinar: The Seven Keys to Business Plan Success]
Probably the most important question to ask 
when developing a business or strategic plan is who should be involved in its creation. Only when driven by the right people does a plan have any chance to be:
- Strategically Sound, striking that fine balance between being feasiblein the context of market, industry, and competitive realities, and suitably inspirational to propel a dedicated team through the inevitable adversities that will arise in its pursuit.
- Tactically Detailed, where the plan’s “to dos” are grounded in the intricacies of the complex operating entities all businesses are - with their motley collections of workers, processes, technologies, capital and reputations.
- Transformationally Capable, where the very strategic soundness and tactical fullness of the plan catalyzes organizational transformation such that while “pre-plan” individual accountabilities were low and business innovation lacking...
...“post plan” strategic projects and tasks actually get done and new ideas and initiatives are born and maintained.
The respective responsibilities for these 3 plan components naturally fall to:
- To A Company’s Leadership, i.e. its CEO and Board, Strategic Direction. And for small companies that do not have a board, then by all means set one up as detailed here. This may seem obvious, but more often than you might think CEOs and Boards get “lost in the weeds” and instead of deciding upon and then sticking to a firm strategic direction instead allow things to “muddle along."
- To a Company’s Management, Tactical Detail. Note that while it can be beneficial to have managers listen-in to leadership as they discuss strategic direction, per the above, it should be crystal-clear that strategic decisions are not made by line managers. The strong point is that for the very most part the jobs of managers are not strategy, but rather to relentlessly drive projects and tasks so that an organization can achieve the goals set by leadership (a subtle but crucial distinction).
- To Everyone, Transformational Capability. This is the most important outcome of a thoughtful planning process: to create such strategic “excitement” that accountabilities and innovations happen naturally, even effortlessly. (To envision this, imagine the cultures at future - forward organizations like Tesla, Uber, Google, et al., where the future visions and strategic directions are so bright and clear).
And finally, a word as to getting outside help on one or all of the above components of the plan.
It is often overlooked that the only way to increase value of a business is to actually increase its sales and revenues, or to have a “high likelihood” plan in place to do so in the future.
And, in turn, the only way to put that “high likelihood” plan in place is by making it more more strategically sound, more tactically “real”, and more transformationally capable..
Given this, for all but the smallest businesses with the most limited of ambitions, the leverage gained through improving any one of these aspects is so high that it almost always makes sense to bring in a trained consultant to assist.
Whether you decide to reach out for help or drive the planning process yourself, just be sure to have the right people focused on the right components of the plan then just maybe the strategic excitement in your business will grow to be so great that good things start happening all by themselves.