We all know Strategy is important, but are you spending enough time on it?

Strategy is all about two questions: ‘where are we going?’ and ‘how are we going to get there?’ There’s often confusion between strategy and tactics, but for me strategy is the big picture. Without a strategy, you have very little chance of achieving your ultimate goals. You must first ensure that your personal and corporate goals are aligned in order to achieve them. If you want to become a millionaire for example, but aren’t prepared to do the things in your business that you need to get there, then you’ll find it very difficult to achieve that goal. So strategy is about taking all of these factors and goals into consideration and creating the ‘big plan’. Many businesses are so wrapped up in the day-to-day stuff that they can find it quite difficult to step away from the business and look at the big plan – but you have to make the time for strategy.

In any business with say, five or more people, I would encourage the Chief Executive i.e. the person who is given the responsibility to look after strategy and bring some thoughts to the table, to spend 20-30% of their time on strategy, asking questions such as:

• What are other people doing?
• What are the funding requirements?
• What’s the market need?
• Where’s the market going?
• How’s it going to get there?
• What are the kind of things that are going to get in the way?

There should be an open dialogue around these questions, preferably off-site, where you take this group, whether it be the whole business, just the board, or the executives and management team. You talk about where you’ve been, where you are now, where you’re going, and whether you’re all on the same page. If everybody is aligned and comfortable with the plan by the end of the session, you can start to write the business plan to achieve it.

Part of the big picture is thinking about where you might get to, so if you want to be the next Freshfields for example, until you sit down and work out how you’re going to achieve that, it’s obviously going to be very difficult to get there. You can follow the process of organic growth and ‘hope it all happens’ – many firms do that and are successful. But the best firms will review their strategy because that will establish their strengths and weaknesses and help them to think about some of the challenges they’ll have to face on that journey.

If you’re not giving this enough thought on a regular basis, I think you’re doing a disservice to your business, yourself and the people around you. So make the time for that strategy day, which can be a couple of half days, as long as it’s enough for your team to say, “Wow, that was really worth doing, now let me get back to the day job because now we’ve got to put all the tactics in place to achieve the big picture” at the end of it. If you are reviewing your strategy on at least an annual basis you’ll establish whether you’re achieving the things you set out to achieve a year ago. If you didn’t – why not? If you did – let’s do more of that!