Benefits of a Sound Business Strategy

In this article, I’m going to explain how we will do an audit of your business strategy, and how that ties into your marketing campaigns. If you’ve read some of our other business consulting articles, you’ve seen that we complete financial audits, brand identity audits, and in-depth onboarding – and these all tie right into this business strategy audit. We have found that organizations that don’t have a sustainable business strategy for long-term growth usually cannot gain from a full-blown marketing strategy

When we first start to work with you, we’re going to do an audit of everything you have that might pertain to your business strategy.  We might ask for things like your business plan, any meeting notes, strategy session notes or worksheets – any assets that you may have that can sum up your business strategy for us.

Then we will run you through a questionnaire and a Scaling Up 4D assessment. The questionnaire is something we’ve put together from a bunch of different resources and experiences throughout the years. We’ve found that these questions are the big ones we need to be answered in order to fully understand the soundness of your strategy. Here is our assessment as it currently stands (we are always updating our processes when we find an improvement may help):

Business Strategy Assessment

Here we will assess three big picture ideas:
What is the current state of the organization?
Where should the organization be headed?
What and how do we change to get you there?

Mission Statement

Is there a clearly written and unambiguous mission statement of your company?
In other words, do you realize what type of business you’re in?

Top-Level Objectives

Do you have a written statement of strategic objectives that are critical to the firm’s performance?
Are they SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-scaling?)

Target Market

Do you know where your products and services are meant to come to?
Is there a written description of your company’s target market?

Customers

Do you know who your customers are, what their characteristics are, and whether they want to purchase from you?

Competitors

Do you have a thorough strategy to keep your firm ahead of the competition?
Do you know what makes the firm competitive? In other words, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the company?
You should define the competitive edge and then identify possible ways of maintaining it through effective planning.

Guiding Policies

Are there written policies and guidelines that the senior management, as well as employees, can use in strategic/tactical decision making and problem-solving?
Can you prove your workers follow the policies?

Business Opportunities

Can you say there’s a strategy to identify and exploit potential opportunities? For example, there can be opportunities for increased sales and profits, developing new products, capturing new markets, others.
Is your company ready to exploit such opportunities?

Threats

Is there a clearly defined and approved plan of actions to address any issues or risks related to the business existence?
Can you say your top-level personnel uses the action plan to effectively respond to threats and uncertainties?

Forecasting

Do you intend to foresee and predict the future activities of the company?
Do you use forecasting as a method of strategic business planning?
Do your managers use the method to avoid surprised and unforeseen changes in the working environment?

What we’re looking for over this questionnaire is an overall soundness of your organization’s strategy. You can look at the keywords and see that it really is a standard business strategy review; mission statement (your “why”), target market (“who” will be marketing to?), threats (what risks need to be addressed?), and forecasting (long-term planning), just to dive in to a few. Ultimately we are looking for answers that will support a growing business, which is what we intend to do with your marketing strategy.

Scaling Up Assessment

Another assessment that we will run you through is called the Scaling Up 4D Assessment. Scaling Ip is a book written by Verne Harnish and it is basically Mastering the Rockefeller Habits part 2. We follow scaling-up very stringently in our business and it has helped us stay very organized on high-level strategy areas so that we can focus on what we really want to do day in and day out, which is to help clients meet their marketing goals. This 4D Assessment will run you through different questions in the areas of cash, people, strategy, and execution, again just helping us get an overview of the health of your business.

After these assessments, we’re going to sit down with you as a part of our consulting package and go over your business strategy with you. If we see any holes, we’re going to point those out and offer suggestions. We offer various services that can potentially help your business move forward before we even look at your marketing strategy. Maybe you need a business plan. Maybe you need to be run through Scaling Up or a similar strategic planning program. We will go over these options during our meeting where we report our findings back to you.

On the other hand, your business strategy may be sound and we are ready for marketing! If this is the case, we should be able to seamlessly transition into our development phase and get your campaigns rockin’ and rollin’.

While yes, we are a marketing agency, we are entrepreneurs first! Everyone on our team has had some business-ownership experience before joining Bolt Goodly, so we speak from personal experience when relaying information about business strategy. If you’re interested in learning more, let’s have a conversation. Contact us below or hit us up on social!!