Creating a strategic plan for your business and then executing that plan is essential for success. Whether you are a solo entrepreneur or have a bricks and morter business taking the time to create a simple strategic plan for your business will pay off in spades. In this episode Coach Kerry will share with you her simple process for creating a strategic plan that works!

Kerry: Well, welcome. You have just joined Hangout with Coach Kerry, Monday mornings, 9:00 AM Pacific Time, live show or of course you could be watching this as a recording from HangoutwithCoachKerry.com.

Hello and my name is Kerry Brown and I am known as the small business expert. So my job is to share with you everything I got in my head here with you, on how to be successful in business.

Today our topic is how to create a simple strategic plan. This is perfect timing because today right now of course it’s the beginning of 2015 and 2015 is a time for obviously thinking about how you’re going to make this year different than last year.

If you’re listening to this halfway through 2015, a simple strategic plan still applies. It’s still an important piece. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to introduce my VIP – have them introduce themselves to you, my VIP panelists, because I’m honored to have them here as my guests and I’m going to have them take themselves off mute one at a time.

So we will start with you Cathy, if can put yourself – take yourself off mute and introduce yourself. That would be great.

Cathy: Good morning Kerry. Thanks for having me on again and I have a business called Niche Travel and I specialize in women’s tours all over the world, spectacular boutique tours and lots of fun with wonderful tour hosts such as you. Kerry, you’re hosting tours for us.

What I would suggest just for anybody interested in traveling with a small group of women, to sign up for my newsletter on NicheTravel.ca and I will send you a lovely women’s world’s best packing list for free.

Kerry: That’s a great packing list. I used it last time when I went to Italy and I went through it and it was fabulous. There were some things on there that I don’t think anyone would have figured to take. But boy, they sure came in handy. So that’s great. Thanks Cathy. OK, Diana. How about you? Take yourself off mute.

Diana: I almost forgot to push mute there. Anyway, I am Dr. Diana Galbraith. I am a former family physician and what I do is I work with women, particularly businesswomen who have spent so much of their time and their energy and extended it all into their business often at the expense of their own health.

So what I do is I really help them come up with ways that they can get that back without having to make dramatic changes or changes that they can’t sustain in their lifestyle. I just want to let everyone know that if they go to my website, 1stGetHealthy.com, I have a great handout there called – or a download there called Ten Essential Steps to Healthy Weight Loss because we so often think it’s just all about diet and exercise and there are so many other things to consider and I know with it being the new year, that’s often what’s on people’s minds.

So I just encourage people to go to my website 1stGetHealthy.com and download that document, Ten Essential Steps to Healthy Weight Loss.

Kerry: Great. Thanks Diana. Heidi, welcome Heidi.

Heidi: Oh, thank you.

Kerry: Tell us about you.

Heidi: Nice to be here. My business is In Your Corner Virtual Assistant Services and we help small businesses leverage themselves by taking over administrative tasks which frees up their time to look after clients, to do client work, to seek out new clients, whatever they need to do.

So my belief is that we can all achieve so much more when we have help. So delegating is the key to success and we’re all about making your work life easier.

Kerry: Great. How can they reach you Heidi if they wanted to find out more about what you do?

Heidi: The website is InYourCornerVA.com.

Kerry: Great, excellent. Thank you.

Heidi: Thank you.

Kerry: Well, I know this is going to be a great call because I’ve got these panelists [0355] the question or the topic today is how to create a simple strategic plan. So Cathy, how about we start with you?

Cathy: Well, my question Kerry is – you’re saying strategic plan. So what’s the difference between a strategic plan and a marketing or business plan?

Kerry: That’s a great question. So often there are all these term “plans”. But then how do you distinguish between them? Well, a business plan is what you start when you’re really first in business. It’s where you have a lot of assumptions about your business. It’s where you’re talking about the overall goals, your overall vision for your business, the overall strategies that you think you’re going to use to create the success that you want, to be able to drive the business.

It will be a little different format if it’s a business plan whether you are going for financing or whether it’s just going to be your sort of guiding map. So this is a long term guiding map document, your business plan is.

Yes, from time to time, you may want to go back and re-look at a full business plan and that maybe if you decide that what you’ve got in place, your assumptions, were really off. It’s time to go back and redo a new business plan again.

So that’s when you use a business plan. Now marketing plan is a plan just around the marketing you’re doing for your business and we will talk about the various strategies you’re going to use, so the strategies for marketing that you’re going to use. It will talk about what are the various vehicles that you’re going to be using. What will be the tactics to take that to the marketplace? So that’s specifically on marketing plan.

What a strategic plan is, a strategic plan will incorporate those marketing ideas but it also could be pieces around your finances, pieces around your administration. It could be pieces around whether you delegate or don’t delegate, whether you hire someone this year or whether you – to be an employee or whether you hire someone like Heidi as a virtual assistant to be on your team.

So it encompasses all the aspects of business, not just marketing, and it’s specific for a specific time period. Where it’s a business plan, it gives that much larger, longer term plan that you have in place that really is where you – you’re starting all your assumptions you have for your business and you’ve really not put them in place.

A strategic plan will look at your back and it will look at where you’re going forward. It will compare and contrast the two of those. So you’re going to do what I call as a gap analysis in there where you’re going to look at what are the things you want to achieve in 2015 and where you are currently right now at the end of 2014. Then there’s the gap in there.

Then the next thing of course is what are the things you’re going to do to bring those two together, to fill up that gap; in other words, to move where you are in 2014 to actually where you want to be at the end of 2015.

So Cathy, did I answer that clearly enough for you that if I said to you today to be able to describe the difference between a business plan, a marketing plan, a strategic plan, you would now know the difference in them?

Cathy: I think so, yeah. That was great Kerry. Thanks.

Kerry: OK, great, excellent, good. So Diana, how about for you?

Diana: Well, I would like to know why it’s so important to do one. What really are the benefits? I would also like to know how extensive or thorough you should be in this plan as maybe compared to the business plan. How thorough should you be?

Kerry: Great. Well, the topic of today is a simple business plan – or sorry, simple strategic plan and so that in itself, a simple meaning – it doesn’t have to be incredibly complicated. The information has to be relevant in it though. So I’m going to deal with that question first. How complicated? How extensive does it have to be?

You have to be really clear about an end – specific and measurable in what you want to achieve going forward. So if your timeframe is the year ahead, then where you want to be at the end of that year.

If I arrive on your doorstep at the end of this coming year and ask you, “Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve?” you would be able to tell me, “Yes, I did because I grew this portion of my business by 10 percent. I did this by a certain percentage,” whatever that might happen to be.

So that you can – that actually has to be measured in your strategic plan. How complicated is it? Well, it really depends on how complex your business is because you may have a very complex business. There may be components of your strategic plan or you may have more components of your strategic plan that you want to analyze and you want to put goals around for 2015 or they may just be simpler ones. You may have three or four. But these are your targets that you want to go for.

Now the most important thing is you need to know where you are right now in it. That’s what makes it sometimes not so simple is the problem is that we don’t take a look at where we are right now. We aren’t honest with ourselves, about what has really happened in our business.

If you are an optimist by nature, then we tend to sometimes look at those things with a very optimistic view point and what we don’t take into consideration is what has really happened. So you need to take a look at the current situation and where you want to be. So that’s what makes it simple.

Then the other piece is why do you need to do one. Well, it would be as if you went on a trip and you didn’t decide where you were going to go, much like a business plan. Why do you do a business plan? It’s because you need a road map. You need to know which direction you’re going. You need to know which cities you’re going to travel through, if you’re going on a vacation. Well, exactly the same thing with a business plan and the same thing for a strategic plan. We’re just talking about a smaller segment of time.

What are the strategies you’re going to use to achieve the outcomes you want? So it’s really important that you do one because if not, I guarantee you this coming year will look much like last year if you’re not really being specific about that, because those are the guide – the guiding things that are going to move you forward that are going to determine which pieces you’re going to take steps on.

Is it going to be around marketing? Is it going to be around your financial management? Is it going to be around your business systems, whatever happens to be in place? That’s a really, really key piece.

So Diana, did I answer your questions for you?

Diana: Yes. No, that was great Kerry. Thank you very much.

Kerry: Good, excellent. So Heidi, I’m going to ask you to take your speaker off mute and ask me your question please.

Heidi: OK. Can you hear me Kerry?

Kerry: Yes, I can.

Heidi: Excellent. So like most things, my question is just, “What are the common mistakes?” So you’re the expert. If you can give us some guidelines of things to avoid or common pitfalls that people fall into when they’re doing their strategic plan.

Kerry: That’s a great question and in fact I was just walking through – actually this past week, two clients working on their strategic plan, because sometimes I will work with people who – this is just the only piece that they work with me with or people who work with me long term.

In both cases, they immediately – once we decided what they wanted to achieve for 2015, immediately went into, “And here’s what I want to do about that.” They immediately moved in to the tactics and strategies they were going to do to achieve that.

Missing the key point which is where are you right now in relationship to that. It’s a really common mistake because if you don’t know where your starting point is, then how do you know what your next first steps are.

So you have to determine where you are right now. What have you achieved? What was your income for 2014? What are the marketing plans that did work and that didn’t work in the marketing strategies that worked and didn’t work in 2014? Where are you in terms of the various other strategies that you got in place around business systems? Are there systems that you have in place that are working and some that aren’t? Are you clear that there are some that are – that need help? That problems occur because you don’t have certain strategies in place?

That’s a really key piece to deal with first before you immediately move into strategies, but our mind immediately jumps there. So if I were to say to each one of you or to our listeners today, “What do you want to achieve in 2015?” and maybe pick one thing, you would say what it is and then immediately your mind – I’m going to ask you all. Is this true? That immediately you think about, OK, here’s what I need to do about that. Isn’t it? It’s the first thing that you do.

Yeah. So that’s the mistake. What you want to do is stop yourself from that process and there are some really key questions you’ve got to ask yourself that are very revealing. What am I confused about? What’s working? What isn’t working? All of those kinds of things. So it’s a really, really key piece for you to be able to identify that, those pieces first before you put your strategies in place.

So Heidi, did that answer your question for you? Are you pretty clear what the key mistake is?

Heidi: Oh, yeah. The key mistake is jumping into – jumping forward before I actually know where I am. So like if you were on Google Maps, you need to have a starting point. So I liked your example about income because that’s an easy one. I know what my income was for last year. So if one of my goals is to increase my income, then I can look at where I was, where I want to be.

Kerry: Yeah, exactly.

Heidi: What worked? What didn’t? How many clients did I have to generate that income? That sort of thing.

Kerry: Absolutely. So those are the metrics that you will get out of doing that, because again everything you want in terms of your strategic plan, you want it to be measurable. So you know if you’re making advancement on it. You know that you need to have 20 clients. Then what does that look like? Where are you right now?

So you want to have those measurements and those benchmarks along the way so that you can see if you’re making progress because if you don’t, how do you know if you’re moving forward. So it’s really key to know where you want to go, where are you right now. Ask yourself those key questions.

What’s working? What isn’t working? What do I need to learn? What am I confused about? All of those kinds of things. Those are really, really key questions to be able to create a plan that’s going to get the traction that you want to be able to have.

So Cathy, I have a sense that you kind of put your hand up for me. What’s another question you might have for me?

Cathy: Well, Kerry, I love this. This is great. I have a great marketing plan. I have a great business plan, but I do not have a strategic plan. So this is perfect information or me.

So what I would say is what are the actual – what’s the format? What are the steps? How do I get going?

Kerry: Great, great question. We don’t have the time on today’s episode to be able to go through all the steps and to have somebody facilitate here because honestly what I would say is that if I were to even give you just the format, for you to do it on yourself or by yourselves, you’re going to shortcut some of those things.

But it starts with what your long term vision is. It’s a really, really key piece. You’ve got to have your vision and you got to check in to see if your vision is exactly where you want to go.

Then what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about what are the goals that you want in your strategic plan. So why are you doing it in the first place? What do you want to achieve with your strategic plan in this upcoming year? So a really, really key piece.

Then we’re going to take a look at where are you right now. And ask some of those really, really tough questions to be able to answer. Then we’re going to get into strategies and tactics with each one of those. So the good news is I’ve decided I’m going to actually have a webinar covering all of these steps and actually walk you through it. So you can actually do the work while we’re on the webinar because I know we all have the best plans in place to be able to do it. But the fact is we don’t often end up doing what we need to do.

So here’s how you’re going to find out about the webinar is I want everyone to go to HangoutWithCoachKerry.com and you can – while you’re there, download my ebook that’s there and how to get out of overwhelm and create massive results. Then from there, you will get a notice from me for the upcoming webinar that’s going to be happening and of course you get to hear from me on some strategies as well and upcoming episodes.

So Cathy, great question. Unfortunately on today’s episode, we don’t have time to go into all of those pieces because the webinar is probably going to be over two segments where you get to do the homework. But there are those key components to it. It starts with your vision. Then what are all those goals you want to achieve? Then currently, where are you right now? And doing the analysis, doing the metrics, measuring all of those things, asking the questions, doing a SWOT analysis. Then you’re going to go into your actual strategies you’re going to put in place and then your tactics out of it.

So as you can see, it’s a pretty simple, even though it’s simple, there islots of information you need to gather from there and you’re going to need the time to be able to sit and think through that. So, that webinar is where I’m going to do that for the people that join us. I think it will be a great opportunity for people to be able to create a plan that gets some traction for them for this upcoming year.

So finally what I would like to do is just ask all my panelists to take their headsets off mute and I would like to get the one thing you’re taking away from today’s episode. It doesn’t have to relate to the question you asked me, but one thing that you’re taking away. We will start with you Cathy.

Cathy: Well first of all, I’m excited to hear about your webinar. That’s wonderful. So I would say my one takeaway is I need to take that webinar.

Kerry: Yeah. OK, great. Good, excellent. Diana.

Diana: Well, I would agree. I think the webinar sounds excellent. I’m really looking forward to hearing about that and I think the other point I want to add is just putting pen to paper and actually doing what you’re saying here because it’s so easy to keep those things in our head and just oh yeah, I’m doing it. It’s in my head. But it’s not on paper. So just the idea of OK, I’m going to do this. I’m going to put it down on paper and do what Kerry says.

Kerry: Yeah, great. Yes, I know, the best laid plans and the reason most people, they know they need to do some kind of planning for this upcoming year and it astounds me how few people actually do that. So thanks for reinforcing that and hopefully the audience is hearing that message come through loud and clear. Heidi, how about for you?

Diana: Well, absolutely excited to hear about the webinar because any guidance that I can receive in the business systems is always most helpful and probably the thing that I’m taking away is just the importance to be realistic about where I am in my business and what I’ve accomplished as opposed to – I am a very optimistic person. So take off those rose-colored glasses is what I’m thinking. So thank you Kerry.

Kerry: Yeah, absolutely. So all great – three great points that you guys have solidified for everybody and again, having a format, having someone walk you through it, which is what we will do on this webinar. So again, go to HangoutWithCoachKerry.com. Download my ebook there and get notifications on upcoming events and this upcoming webinar as well.

Remember, you can always find us here, Monday mornings 9:00 AM Pacific at HangoutWithCoachKerry.com. You can watch directly off of the website and you can find us on – you can find me on YouTube as well. Please join me in my Google Plus community. It’s called Kerry Brown Small Business Community. Please join me there. Interact. Ask your questions. It’s another opportunity for you to get access to me and it allows me to do what I love to do which is serve you all.

So in the meantime, have a great week. Start thinking about this strategic plan, what goals you want to have for this upcoming year and we will talk to you next Monday morning. Talk to you then. Bye-bye everybody.

Cathy: Bye Kerry. Thanks again.

 Diana: Bye Kerry.

Kerry: Bye-bye.

 Heidi: Have a great weekend everybody.