Three Powerful Ways To Think and Act Strategically in Your Practice

Strategic planning tenet #1: Think big picture

It’s common to start strategic planning efforts by focusing on the minutiae and specific details of a plan. But that’s diving too deep too fast. Strategic planning should start with the big picture in mind. Big-picture thinking allows you to:

• Be a better leader and get out in front of opportunities.
• Ensure that the investments you make in your business support what you plan to accomplish.
• Promote teamwork—people are motivated by big-picture goals.
• Confirm that the day-to-day work you’re doing “in the trenches” is actually aligned with your objectives. It informs the steps and tactics you take each day.

Big-picture thinking starts with a vision of the ideal future for your practice. The word “vision” comes across as a bit soft to some. But the fact is, vision is a powerful business tool that can be used to motivate, unify and inspire employees, business partners, other constituents and even clients. In fact, many studies have shown that when business leaders develop and effectively communicate a compelling vision of their firms’ futures, their constituents report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction, commitment and loyalty, productivity and other key drivers of success.

One approach to crafting a vision that we’ve seen increasingly used by top business owners is often called the vivid vision method. It encourages you to imagine your business’s ideal future five years from the present moment. A vivid vision document will spell out in writing the key components of your ideal practice, such as:

• The values you have emphasized and that have spread throughout the team.
• The culture you have built.
• The specific roles and team members you have in place, and where their efforts are focused.
• The core business activities you engage in that drive your success.
• The financial condition of your practice.
• The methods you use to successfully attract and retain clients.

This vivid vision process often has the effect of reenergizing owners, staff and anyone else involved in your success. By envisioning and documenting in detail what you want your firm to be in five years’ time, you create an engaging picture of the future that acts almost like a magnet.

As you develop a vision for your business, you start to gain an understanding of why you do what you do—what is often called clarity of purpose. Consider asking yourself the question “Why am I in this business?” at least five times in a row. The reason: By digging into this question, you get past the quick, easy answers—such as “making money.” Yes, we all want to generate a good income, but money is only a surface concern. Go deeper in your thinking until you get to a clear and compelling purpose—one that will call out to you and your team, become “top of mind” and compel you to take the right actions to achieve what is most important to you.

Another key big-picture component of strategic planning is your value promise. To win new business today, you need to understand and be able to convey how you help clients make smart decisions and defend them against threats to their goals, your expertise within your chosen market, and why those people should want to work with you. Use this value promise to focus your team. Like you, your team needs to clearly understand the niche they serve and the unique value they can bring to that cohort. This helps ensure that there is no misunderstanding about what you do and for whom you do it.

With a clear value promise in place, you can develop short-term, medium-term and long-range goals, the tactics for achieving them, and the metrics you need to track and monitor your progress.

Strategic planning tenet #2: Begin at the end

Before you start planning, work backward from the desired results you want. Carefully consider where you want to go and what hurdles you might face along the way. Think about goals you want to achieve over the next 18 months, for example. Many top professional services providers pursue goals such as serving larger/more affluent clients, focusing on target niche markets, and generating more introductions to prospective clients.

Then think about the specific obstacles that could prevent you from reaching those specific goals. For example, say you want income growth of 25% or to add ten new clients. Specific obstacles that might get in the way of those types of goals include the time you have to spend training new staff, or the systems you currently have in place that prevent you from spending time on client-facing activities.

Once you’ve spent time focusing on results and the obstacles in the way of those results, it is time to move toward strategy. This works better than the traditional way of strategizing first and ending with goals—when you use that approach, often you don’t get past the obstacles phase. It’s been said that all the things that seem to oppose our goals are actually the raw materials for achieving them. Thinking about obstacles in this way is extremely liberating. If your obstacles are closely tied to the results you said you wanted to achieve, you suddenly have the keys to overcoming them.

Consider the previous example of income growth of 25% as the goal, and “time spent with new staff” and “systems that take focus off client activities” as the obstacles. In this case, thinking strategically might lead to solutions such as delegating or outsourcing non-client-facing activities, and implementing consistent business processes throughout your practice.

The upshot: Don’t let the thought of the obstacles in your way shut down your strategic thinking before it’s begun. Instead, view your obstacles as the raw material that you will use to develop your strategies for success.

Strategic planning tenet #3: Execute on your plan

Plans are great, but you’ve got to act or you’ll make no progress.

Set specific goals and milestones to begin the work to make your vision a reality. Choose the broad strategies you will use to reach each goal. Identify the tactics for implementing each strategy. Once these tactics are clear, decide on the actions for executing each tactic. Ensure that each action is specific and achievable, assign a person to be responsible for its implementation, and set a target date for completion.

Above all, communicate with your people on an ongoing basis. Lack of effective communication is probably the biggest reason businesses fail to execute.

• Get buy-in on your strategic plan ahead of time from the key constituents in your practice—from the top, mission level all the way down through the plan.
• Create a direct tie-in to the overall plan for your staff. Employees need to know how what they do on a daily basis ties into the overall plan.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This report was published by the VFO Inner Circle, a global financial concierge group working with affluent individuals and families, and is distributed with its permission. Copyright 2024 by AES Nation, LLC.