MOST Analysis

Mission Statement

A Winning Aspiration defines the purpose of your enterprise, its guiding mission and aspiration, in strategic terms. The first choice of the strategic choice cascade is winning aspirations. Here we ask, “what is our winning aspiration.” Strategically, our winning aspiration defines our purpose. Aspirations are a view of the future. Qualified with “winning,” it is the ideal future that we strive to achieve. Unless you deliberately set out to win, it is impossible to do so. A business that only wants to participate rather than succeed will invariably fall short of making the difficult decisions and large investments necessary to succeed. Aspirations that are too modest rather than lofty are much more harmful. Most businesses fail because they have low expectations.

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Objectives

01. Share your Winning Aspirations: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Review your Strategy: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Identify your Growth & Contingencies: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Know your Marketplace: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Define your Competitive Advantage: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Establish your Strategic Priorities: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Flexible Strategy Development: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Build your Growth Plan: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Ensure Confidence in the Plan: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Build your Financial Plan: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Build your People Plan: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Execute your Strategy: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month

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Strategies

01. Share your Winning Aspirations: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Review your Strategy: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Identify your Growth & Contingencies: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Know your Marketplace: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Define your Competitive Advantage: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Establish your Strategic Priorities: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Flexible Strategy Development: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Build your Growth Plan: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Ensure Confidence in the Plan: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Build your Financial Plan: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Build your People Plan: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Execute your Strategy: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.

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Tasks

01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Share your Winning Aspirations.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Review your Strategy.
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Identify your Growth & Contingencies.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Know your Marketplace.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Define your Competitive Advantage.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Establish your Strategic Priorities.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Flexible Strategy Development.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Build your Growth Plan.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Ensure Confidence in the Plan.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Build your Financial Plan.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Build your People Plan.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Execute your Strategy.

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Introduction

In the previous workshop, we discussed how your internal business assessment was the first stage in your acquisitive growth journey. During the business assessment stage, you highlight a set of ‘achievables’, or objectives which you will set out to achieve within your internal process before you set out on your acquisitive growth journey. In workshop 2, we will be discussing the strategies that will help you achieve these goals, or the HOW – HOW will you achieve these goals? What strategies must you put in place to make these changes happen?

In workshop 2, we will discuss the importance of strategy and how your strategic aspirations need to be felt and understood by your whole business in order for these aspirations to become reality. During this workshop, we will highlight the importance of communication, planning, flexibility, establishing priorities, and other important factors which will help you create a strategic acquisitive growth plan.

How Strategy Really Works

What is Strategy?

Strategy is really about choosing precise actions to succeed in the marketplace. A company develops a durable competitive edge over its rivals by “deliberately adopting a new set of activities to generate unique value,” according to Michael Porter, author of Competitive Strategy, arguably the most well-known book on strategy ever written. So, strategy entails making clear decisions—to do certain things and not others—and constructing a business around those decisions. Simply said, choice is a strategy. More formally, a strategy is a coordinated sequence of decisions that places a company in its industry in a special position to generate competitive advantage and greater value.

Too often CEO’s allow the urgent to cloud out the important. “When an organizational bias for action drives doing, often thinking falls by the wayside.”

Many leaders have a propensity to approach strategy in one of the inefficient ways listed below rather than developing it:

1. They define strategy as a vision;
2. They define strategy as a plan;
3. They deny that long-term strategy is possible;
4. They define strategy as the optimization of the status quo; and
5. They define strategy as following best practices.

“These ineffective approaches,” Lafley and Martin argue, “are driven by a misconception of what strategy really is and a reluctance to make truly hard choices.”

Everyone like to have as many options as possible, but in order to “win,” you must make and implement decisions. Tough decisions require you to make them, but if you let them, they can also focus your organization. Great organizations choose to win.

A corporation will invariably fall short of making the difficult decisions and substantial investments that would make winning even a remote possibility when it sets out to participate rather than win.

Particularly, the answers to these five interconnected problems are found in strategy:

1. What is your winning aspiration? The purpose of your enterprise, its motivating aspiration.
2. Where will you play? A playing field where you can achieve that aspiration.
3. How will you win? The way you will win on the chosen playing field.
4. What capabilities must be in place? The set and configuration of capabilities required to win in the chosen way.
5. What management systems are required? The systems and measures that enable the capabilities and support the choices.

As one might expect, a small firm might only have one choice cascade, whereas a large corporation might have several “levels of choices and interconnected cascades.” Nested cascades indicate that decision-making occurs at practically every organizational level.

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Winning Aspirations

Statements concerning the ideal future are known as aspirations. Later on in the process, a corporation attaches certain precise benchmarks that track progress toward those goals to those aspirations. … Over time, aspirations can be adjusted and changed. Because they exist to consistently align business actions, aspirations shouldn’t vary day to day and should be made to persist for a while.

Creating a Winning Aspiration

Question 1: What is your company’s purpose, or “winning aspiration”?

Choose your concept of success and what you want your organization to accomplish in order to respond to the first question in the cascade. What would be your company’s ideal future? A declaration of purpose may be part of your “winning aspiration,” which is the response, but it’s not the sole component. Also, it describes what “winning” or success” for your business would mean. A business can take steps to achieve its winning condition once it recognizes it.

Make your goals on helping and gratifying your customers rather than about producing a particular amount of money and appeasing your stakeholders in order to create your organization’s winning conditions. You have little prospect of success if you don’t have customers. Look at well-known company missions like Nike’s (“to inspire and innovate for every athlete in the globe”); they all speak of satisfying customers rather than stakeholders. In reality, they speak of success for their clients—becoming the finest or the industry’s pioneer in service provision.

What Winning Looks Like

You must ascertain the deeper-than-surface nature of your firm in order to determine your winning aim.

Typically, businesses would claim that their product or service is what makes them successful. For instance, a telecom corporation might claim that they manufacture and sell phones. All prosperous businesses, however, are truly in the business of satisfying consumer requirements; their product is merely the means. For instance, the telecom corporation actually makes money by satisfying its customers’ desire to communicate with one another. By selling phones, they meet this demand.

In a similar vein, focus your winning goals more on satisfying client demands than on a particular product. Assess the demands of your clients to determine how to effectively serve them. Then, customize your business to provide the best possible solution to that demand.

Defeating Competitors

There will always be rivals in any market, many of whom will also be playing for stakes. Finding the rival that poses the most threat to you—the business you believe to be the best—is one method to improve your own strategy. then inquire as to what they are doing that I am not. How do they provide a better level of service than I do? What could I do to beat them to it?

For instance, P&G underwent a reorganization in 1999–2000 in the midst of a mild recession. They changed their tactics in response to pressure from their rivals in order to outwit them. They came to the conclusion that they needed to diversify their holdings by utilizing a “best-of-breed” strategy and enlisting the aid of organizations like Hewlett-Packard for their IT. This strategy not only helped both businesses win, but it also established a partnership in which P&G could rely on Hewlett-competent Packard’s services: Hewlett-most Packard’s significant client became P&G. The alliance was strong and long-lasting.

P&G sought a solution that would help them win and outperform rivals rather than a “good answer.” As a result, they were able to identify a variety of businesses to collaborate with that they considered to be the greatest in their respective industries. P&G seized every opportunity to gain a competitive edge—something that all businesses ought to aim to accomplish.

The Importance of Playing to Win

Due to how difficult winning is, you must have a winning aspiration. Businesses that strive for success don’t always succeed. You therefore have no chance of winning if you are only trying to participate. You actually stand a good probability of losing.

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How to create and execute an acquisitive growth strategy

Any business owner will tell you that expanding a company through an acquisition or merger is challenging.

That makes excellent sense because data frequently show that running a firm successfully is difficult enough without having to scale for significant growth.

Around 20% of businesses fail before they reach year one, 50% don’t survive five years, and 66 percent don’t survive ten years, according to the U.S. Small Business Association (SBA).

What, therefore, is the secret to those business growth success tales where modest starting firm owners are propelled into the opulent millionaire lifestyle?

There isn’t a magic solution, of course, or we would all be millionaires by now.

Yet that fantasy doesn’t have to be so far off with some careful market research, a clear understanding of your potential, and a fantastic business growth plan.

The idea of acquisitive growth strategy, several growth strategy kinds, a plan for sustaining a growing business, and a few instances of successful businesses’ growth strategies will all be covered in this session.

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Why is strategic planning important?

Does your staff understand the acquisition-focused growth plan of your business? How much time do you spend each month creating that plan?

You’re not alone if your responses fall short of expectations. Research from Bridges Business Consultancy shows that 48% of leaders talk about strategy for fewer than one day each month.

So, it should come as no surprise that 48% of all firms fail to achieve at least 50% of their strategic goals. Planning is necessary to make sure a company strategy is flexible and implementable before an organization can benefit from it.

Here’s an explanation of strategic planning and how it can help your business develop through acquisitions.

What is strategic planning?

The ongoing organizational process of using the information at hand to outline a company’s desired course is known as strategic planning. By this approach, the organization’s acquisitive growth goals are aligned with shareholders’ and employees’ interests, resources are allocated efficiently, and goals are supported by facts and rationale.

It’s critical to stress that strategic planning is a continuous process, not a single meeting. Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School writes in the online course Disruptive Strategy that 93 percent of HBS graduates who launched businesses had successful strategies that changed and pivoted away from their initial strategic intentions.

“Most people think of strategy as an event, but that’s not the way the world works,” Christensen says. “When we run into unanticipated opportunities and threats, we have to respond. Sometimes we respond successfully; sometimes we don’t. But most strategies develop through this process. More often than not, the strategy that leads to success emerges through a process that’s at work 24/7 in almost every industry.”

Planning strategically takes time, effort, and ongoing evaluation. If given the right consideration, it can put your company on the right path. Three advantages of strategic planning are listed below.

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Best Buy’s winning strategy

The international electronics store Best Buy is a great illustration of how a change in company strategy may result in explosive growth. Best Buy was up against severe market rivalry in 2012 from big-box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot as well as online retailers like Amazon. The outcome was that the business lost more than a billion dollars in revenue in only one quarter.

The management of Best Buy chose to capitalize on an existing resource that was not being used to its full potential: its storefronts, as opposed to closing locations or creating new items. Best Buy began utilizing its locations as “mini warehouses,” resulting in quicker delivery, simpler client pickup, and increased product availability. Best Buy boosted its WTP as a result of making the customer’s experience more convenient.

Because it reduced WTS as a result of this endeavor, Best Buy is a prime example of a value-based company strategy. Best Buy gave its vendors a cost-effective choice by maintaining the vast network of stores and allowing vendors to construct showrooms inside of its locations. This added value reduced suppliers’ WTS, which resulted in product discounts.

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Benefits of strategic planning

1. Create One, Forward-Focused Vision

Every person is impacted by strategy, which provides a practical means of achieving your company’s aspirations for accretive growth.

The creation of a unified, future-focused vision via strategic planning can help your business and its shareholders unite, which is a huge advantage. You may instill a greater feeling of responsibility within your firm by making everyone aware of the objectives of your business, the selection process that went into selecting those objectives, and what they can do to assist in achieving them.

There may be a cascading impact from this. For instance, if a manager doesn’t understand the strategy of your company or the thinking behind it, they may decide on a team level to work against it. Everyone at your company can operate with a bigger strategy in mind if you have a single vision for everyone to rally around.

2. Draw Attention to Biases and Flaws in Reasoning

You make decisions that are biased by nature. Participating in the strategic planning process pushes you to consider each decision you make, to justify it with statistics, projections, or case studies, and to overcome any cognitive biases you may have.

A few examples of cognitive biases are:

• The recency effect: The tendency to select the option presented most recently because it’s fresh in your mind
• Occam’s razor bias: The tendency to assume the most obvious decision to be the best decision
• Inertia bias: The tendency to select options that allow you to think, feel, and act in familiar ways

Confirmation bias is one cognitive bias that could be more challenging to spot in action. It is a tendency to simply pay attention to facts that supports a given position when trying to validate it.

When creating a strategic plan for your business, if you already have a preferred approach in mind, engage the help of people who have different perspectives to find evidence that supports or refutes your theory.

The entire team must put forth effort and commitment to combat biases in strategic decision-making, which can strengthen your organization’s strategy.

3. Track Progress Based on Strategic Goals

Tracking your progress toward goals can be made possible by having a strategic strategy in place. The success of your firm can be directly impacted by each department’s and team’s progress when they are aware of the overall plan of the business, resulting in a top-down approach to tracking key performance indicators (KPIs).

KPIs can be established at the organizational level by designing your company’s strategy and identifying its goals. Then, these objectives can be expanded to include company divisions, departments, teams, and people. This makes sure that every level of your organization is in sync and can have a positive effect on the performance and KPIs of your company.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that your approach must stay flexible whilst being comprehensive and organized. According to Christensen in Disruptive Strategy, a company’s strategy must adapt to the possibilities and challenges it faces. Be ready to adjust your KPIs as your goals change, and let your organization know why.

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4 ways to develop your strategic thinking skills

Consider the last time you took part in a meeting for strategic planning for your company. Most likely, you were given a problem to solve or a target to reach.

Can you recall the contributions you made at that meeting? Did you make strong arguments and lay out a plan of action, or did you find it challenging to think critically and come up with a solution? Did you have a wonderful idea but find it difficult to explain it clearly? Did you actively contribute to the conversation, or was it led by others?

The most in-demand managerial abilities are those that include strategic thinking. Why? Because the direction of a firm can be greatly impacted by workers who are capable of critical, rational, and strategic thought.

The good news is that you can develop your strategic thinking abilities with the appropriate attitude and practice.

Here are four techniques to sharpen your strategy abilities so that the next time you participate in a meeting for strategic planning, your contributions will be acknowledged.

What are strategic thinking skills?

All abilities that help you apply critical thinking to solve complicated problems and make future plans are considered strategic thinking abilities. These abilities are necessary to attain professional goals, get over roadblocks, and deal with hurdles, especially if they are anticipated to take weeks, months, or even years to complete.

Skills in strategic thinking include:

• You must be able to analyze a number of inputs, from financial statements and KPIs to market circumstances, developing business trends, and internal resource allocation, in order to come up with a strategy that helps your organization achieve its goals. To develop a plan that is in line with the present situation your firm is facing, this preliminary analysis is essential.

• Communication skills: Regardless of the size of your business, developing a strategy will involve effective communication abilities. Strategic thinking is mostly based on the capacity to effectively convey complicated concepts, interact with internal and external stakeholders, forge agreement, and make sure that everyone is on the same page and pursuing the same objectives.

• Problem-solving abilities: Strategic planning is frequently used to resolve issues like missed financial targets, ineffective processes, or a new rival. You must first comprehend the issue and its potential remedies in order to put into action a plan that solves the primary obstacle you are facing. From there, you can develop a plan of action to resolve it.

• Planning and management abilities: Strategy is more than just coming up with a solution; it also requires putting that solution into action. To put everything together after data analysis, problem comprehension, and solution identification, you need to have good planning and management abilities.

How to improve your strategic thinking skills

1. Ask Strategic Questions

One of the simplest things you can do to develop your strategic thinking abilities is to ask more strategic questions. By doing this, you may practice your planning abilities, improve your ability to see opportunities, and cultivate a more strategic attitude that you can use throughout your career.

The issue, opportunity, or ambiguity you are now facing in your circumstance, whether it be personal or professional, can be related to a strategic dilemma, according to the Harvard Business School Online course Disruptive Strategy. For instance, they might have to do with launching a new company or product, outpacing a rival, or organizing your corporation for innovation.

It’s crucial that your inquiries relate to your position and duties so that you can take appropriate action.

Some examples of strategic questions you might ask include:

• How can we strategically position ourselves to enter a new market?
• What’s the direction for growth for each of our products or services?
• Where will the organization’s growth come from in the next five years, and how does it compare with where growth has historically come from?
• How should the organization respond to the threat presented by potentially disruptive competitors?

2. Observe and Reflect

You must not only pose strategic inquiries, but also skillfully respond to and address them. One of the best methods to do this is to observe and think about your current circumstance, making sure that any strategy you come up with is supported by data.

Imagine, for instance, that the company you work for has started to lose market share among its loyal clients for one of its goods. While doing so, it has expanded its customer base and increased its market share. It’s simple to speculate as to why this might be happening, but doing so could send your business down the incorrect route at a crucial juncture in its history.

Get as much knowledge as you can to use while developing your approach, rather than assuming something without doing your research. This can involve, for instance, interviewing new clients to learn about the various tasks they use your product for.

You can modify your marketing strategy and product development to better meet their demands by understanding what draws new customers to your product.

3. Consider Opposing Ideas

Once you’ve chosen a course of action that will enable your company to achieve its objectives, challenge your presumptions and put your hypothesis to a thorough test. You can make sure you’re not skipping over another option by doing this.

Playing the devil’s advocate with your ideas can help you anticipate where your case might fall short and prepare you to defend your approach when others raise concerns. Also, it can assist you in developing the logic abilities required to explain and carry out your plan.

Make it a practice to check your assumptions whenever you’re about to make a statement if you want to master this skill. Should you think about an alternative viewpoint? Is there a different possibility that you might have missed?

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Nike’s world-class strategy

Nike has established itself as one of the top global sports brands in the world as the largest manufacturer of shoes, apparel, and accessories for athletes. While Nike’s iconic items have contributed significantly to its success, the company has also outperformed its competitors thanks to smart business decisions.

Value-based pricing had a significant role in the company’s reported $44 billion in global revenue in 2021. For instance, Nike regularly raises prices within their WTP by taking advantage of consumers’ views of its products. Nike may achieve this by producing goods of the greatest caliber in order to charge a premium price.

Due to Nike’s most significant asset—its reputation—its image, many of its rivals find it difficult to adopt the same business strategy. Nike’s corporate management has long recognized that its pricing strategy is affected not only by the caliber of its goods but also by the popularity of its emblem. Nike’s unique items, like Air Jordans, have helped to raise the perception of company value by acknowledging its social and market significance. As a result, Nike’s long-term success in steadily increasing its customers’ WTP is founded on two important pillars: brand value and customer loyalty.

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Executive Summary

Chapter 1: Share Your Winning Aspirations

What is the goal of a successful company? Why must a business compete to win?

A company’s vision of success in the market (through acquisition or merger) is referred to as a winning aspiration. Businesses must always play to win because competing alone makes it very tough to succeed. Simply trying to compete puts businesses at danger of being driven out by more aggressive rivals.

Learn more about the significance of setting winning aspirations for your business.

How to Develop a Winning Aspiration

Check out the following examples:

What is the “winning aspiration” of your organization, or what is its purpose?

Determine your concept of success and the goals your organization has for its journey toward acquisitive expansion before you can respond to the first question in the cascade. What would be your company’s ideal future? A declaration of purpose may be part of your “winning aspiration,” which is the response, but it’s not the sole component. Also, it describes what “winning” or success” for your business would mean. A business can take steps to achieve its winning condition once it recognizes it.

Make your goals on helping and gratifying your customers rather than about producing a particular amount of money and appeasing your stakeholders in order to create your organization’s winning conditions. You have little prospect of success if you don’t have customers. Look at well-known company missions like Nike’s (“to inspire and innovate for every athlete in the globe”); they all speak of satisfying customers rather than stakeholders. In reality, they speak of success for their clients—becoming the finest or the industry’s pioneer in service provision.

What Winning Looks Like

You must ascertain the deeper-than-surface nature of your firm in order to determine your winning aim.

Typically, businesses would claim that their product or service is what makes them successful. For instance, a telecom corporation might claim that they manufacture and sell phones. All prosperous businesses, however, are truly in the business of satisfying consumer requirements; their product is merely the means. For instance, the telecom corporation actually makes money by satisfying its customers’ desire to communicate with one another. By selling phones, they meet this demand.

In a similar vein, focus your winning goals more on satisfying client demands than on a particular product. Assess the demands of your clients to determine how to effectively serve them. Then, customize your business to provide the best possible solution to that demand.

Important Components of Your Communication Strategy for Winning Aspirations

Use this method to decide the essential components of your communication plan: who, why, what, when, and where.

Who both refers to the communicator and the target audience. The company as a whole needs to be aware of your goals and objectives, even though your acquisitive growth journey may only be focused on a few divisions inside your organization. To properly spread the word, a communicator should be assigned to each department or group. To save time, it’s critical to limit the number of communicators.

In this equation, the why and what might be interpreted as the goal or message. Your winning goals will be the original objective of the communication strategy, which is to communicate the plan’s original purpose. Why are we acting as we are? In order to convey our winning goals with the company and win their support, we are putting the communication plan into action.

When should the message be delivered? The required frequency of communication will be determined by the needs of your target audience. It is usually best to err on the side of too much communication if you are unclear of how much is required. John Kotter writes in his article “Leading Change” that “workers’ hearts and minds are never captivated without credible communication, and a lot of it.”

Where should you communicate, and how? Good communication frequently requires a lot of work, and the message typically needs to be repeated numerous times. We advise communicating your winning ambitions to staff members numerous times to ensure that the message is understood and that they are aware of how they help with acquisitive growth.

Don’t forget to request and give feedback from others since communication is a two-way street.

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Chapter 2: Review your Strategy

Everybody has a strategy. The question … is it the right one?

Is it one that:

• is going to get you to where you want to go?
• provides a sustainable competitive advantage and superior value?
• everyone understands, believes in, and is committed to achieving?

You must take the appropriate steps to assure your success if you want to have a plan that works for acquisitive expansion. You should start by becoming familiar with the factors that are most likely to affect your sector. Then, develop a strategy for competing and, most crucially, for earning money. Your strategy must also consider your target market, how you will position yourself in the market, and how you will deliver your product or service differently from your rivals. All of this will give you the green light to adopt successful techniques and reject those that don’t work in this situation.

Organizations discuss the status of their goals and objectives during a strategy review and make the necessary changes for the future year.

On the surface, there may not seem to be a need for a strategy review, but as you embark on your journey toward acquisitive expansion, you’ll reap a variety of advantages from making the time to assess performance and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

• The chance for employees to re-engage with the strategy is one of the most important advantages. Some people might not frequently be involved in the strategic plan depending on where they sit within the organization. Everyone’s attention is brought back to it by periodically reviewing it, hopefully inspiring a sense of purpose that has been lost.

• It strengthens the alignment of the organization. Getting everyone together to define shared objectives fosters cooperation and teamwork. Also, employees are reminded of the greater picture and how their daily actions fit into it.

• It also fosters teamwork among members, creating a culture that is supportive and high-performing. Leaders have the chance to influence culture during strategy review sessions by praising team members for activities that support organizational values and encouraging inclusivity.

• Last but not least, it gives you the possibility to spot potential prospects for financial gain related to new acquisitions. You may decide to significantly alter your strategy, such as setting a new goal or reallocating resources, as a result of assessing current market conditions and internal performance. This will increase your chances of success.

What’s in a review?

Evaluating your growth strategy is crucial, but for it to work, it must be done correctly. Your evaluation highlights developments and issues that require adjustment. Make sure you are able to apply these lessons from your procedure.

A review should compare accomplishments against a set of challenging requirements. If the conditions weren’t considered when you established your strategy, it could be a good idea to reassess it as soon as possible and include certain goals in your plan for acquisitive expansion.

These are the goals you’re seeking to achieve with your growth strategy, and this course manual will discuss what makes a successful objective later on. If you’re on course to meet them, a review ought to be able to notify you.

You should evaluate your plan periodically to assess progress on two fronts:

• Tactics – strategies are made up of individual tactics to be completed. If your business isn’t on track, why has this happened?

• Current growth – if a strategy is far from completion, this helps set a baseline for how much growth is normal. If parts have been completed, it helps you see how much it’s already helping.

If you’re falling behind, is it because there’s a bottleneck that you need to free up first, or is it because you were too ambitious? You can change your priorities to make yourself more scalable first, or modify your objectives to be more realistic.

If you’re making good progress but not achieving much growth, was this expected? If what you had done should have already triggered some growth, ask yourself if the strategy needs to be replaced.

When and how often should you do a strategy review?

Most businesses conduct a strategy review once a year, usually at the conclusion of their fiscal year. Your review would therefore occur in January or February if you operate on a calendar year; otherwise, it would occur at the start of your fiscal year.

By carrying out this assessment every year, you may analyze the results from the previous year and focus on any aspects that might need to be altered going forward. Yet, it makes sense to hold an ad hoc session to realign your goals at that time if your corporation undergoes a significant change, such as obtaining new business.

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Chapter 3: Identify your Growth & Contingencies

Growth and emergency planning have been at the forefront of successful acquisition for many years. By addressing the what-ifs in your company, you can be proactive in ensuring both short- and long-term success:

• What if … our assumptions are incorrect?
• What if … our largest customer goes out of business?
• What if … our competitors actively pursue our accounts?
• What if … our business gets hit with another Black Swan, like COVID-19?
• What if?… What if?… What if?…

A contingency is a good or service that has already been investigated, developed, and economically justified and is ready to be used right away. It’s a crucial step in the planning process for your sales.

Remember that creating new products and services is just one aspect of contingency planning. It’s possible to accomplish some level of expansion by smart acquisitions, adding to an existing service, etc. For product and service innovation contingencies, we typically advise setting aside 15% or more of your whole sales budget.

It’s crucial to lay the foundation necessary for fast activation.

Growth through acquisition is a hard business. To achieve long-term company success, businesses must always work to find fresh chances for growth. Because of this, it is crucial for your company to build new perspectives that will eventually contribute to the creation of concepts that the competition has missed.

The identification of unmet client or consumer wants and the issues they are attempting to solve are examples of insights. You may also find that by expanding your workforce through acquisitions, you can enhance your sales by marketing your goods and services in a new region.

Concepts typically range from bold and ambitious to simple and small. As ideas are the heart of a company, they shouldn’t be ignored. Sometimes all it takes is a slight shift in perspective for a concept to materialize into a workable business plan.

Hence, investing in a strong process for the “front end of innovation” has a favorable effect on the amount and quality of ideas generated as well as on everyone’s overall engagement.

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Chapter 4: Know your Marketplace

You may better position your company to be competitive and serve your consumers by conducting a market analysis.

• A market analysis is a comprehensive evaluation of a market inside of a certain sector.
• A market study offers several advantages, including lowering business risk and improving the quality of your business decisions.

In order to conduct a market study, there are seven steps.

One of the first essential elements to business accomplishment is comprehending your customer base. Without knowing who, what, and how to best serve your clients, your company may find it difficult to develop an efficient marketing plan. When it comes to this, a market analysis is useful. Although it can take a lot of time, a market study can be completed in seven simple steps.

What is a market analysis?

An in-depth evaluation of a market within a particular industry is what is known as a market analysis. You will research the market dynamics, including volume and value, possible client segments, purchasing trends, rivalry, and other crucial elements. The following inquiries should be addressed by a thorough marketing analysis:

• Who are my likely clients?
• What purchasing patterns do my customers have?
• What is the size of my target market?
• What price range will customers accept for my product or service?
• Who are my main rivals?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of my competitors?

What are the benefits of running a marketing analysis?

A marketing analysis can help project income, detect new trends, and lower risk. A marketing analysis can be helpful at various phases of your company’s development, and it may even be wise to perform one annually to stay on top of any significant market changes.

Your strategic business plan will typically include a thorough market study because it helps you better understand your target audience and the competition. This will assist you in creating a marketing plan that is more focused.

The following are some more key advantages of completing a market analysis:

• Risk reduction: By understanding your market and the key players in your sector, as well as what it takes to succeed, you may lower the risks associated with your firm and make better business decisions. You can also perform a SWOT analysis, which highlights your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, to assist you better safeguard your enterprise.

• Targeted goods or services: Knowing exactly what your clients need from you puts you in a far better position to provide their needs. When you are aware of who your clients are, you can utilize that knowledge to customize your services to meet their needs.

• Emerging trends: Keeping on top of industry trends with a marketing analysis is a wonderful method to position yourself to benefit from this information. Staying ahead in business frequently involves being the first to recognize a new opportunity or trend.

• Revenue forecasts: A market prediction is an important part of most marketing analysis since it predicts the size, makeup, and trends of your target market in the future. As a result, you have an estimate of the profits you may anticipate and can modify your budget and business plan as necessary.

• Assessment benchmarks: Measuring your company’s success in terms other than just numbers can be challenging. Using benchmarks or key performance indicators (KPIs) from a market analysis, you can assess how well your business is performing relative to others in your industry.

• Context for past errors: Marketing analytics can shed light on industry oddities or past errors made by your company. For instance, detailed analytics can explain the factors that affected the sale of a particular product or the reasons behind the performance of a particular statistic. Because you’ll be able to examine and explain what went wrong and why, this can assist you prevent repeating those errors or encountering similar anomalies.

• Marketing optimization: Here is where a yearly marketing analysis is useful. Regular analysis may guide your continuing marketing initiatives and show you which area