The Road Well-Traveled (Is One With a Map)

My husband likes to take car trips. I hate them. I get sick. During our 20 years of marriage, I’ve had to learn how to take a road trip and not get sick. I’ve figured out that I need to know how long we’ll drive, when we will stop, when we’ll eat, and when I’ll get to sleep. If I don’t get to stretch, eat, or sleep, my husband can look forward to me being sick the entire time.

My reaction to a car trip without a schedule is a great analogy of what it’s like to run a practice without a Strategic Plan. The employees are the ones who end up sick (and tired), the partners are the ones who want to stop, and the owner is the one who gets no sleep. Why should your firm have a Strategic Plan? You wouldn’t get in a car and take a road trip without a map, so why run a practice without a plan?

A Strategic Plan is a valuable tool that maps your practice’s journey from present to future. It defines new opportunities and new markets, and it honestly addresses challenges and opportunities in management, operations, service delivery, sales and leadership. Without a Strategic Plan, you end up wherever the wind may take you.

Here are three important rules for developing an effective Strategic Plan:

• Be honest. Strategic Planning, done well, examines all of your practice’s functional areas and develops plans, tactics, and strategies to achieve long and short-term business goals. It will fail if the participants are less than honest with themselves and others about the firm’s opportunities and challenges. Ask for honest comments and observations, and receive them without judgment or criticism. While all points of view can’t be reflected in a focused strategic plan, all must be heard in order to have buy-in to the final plan.

• Focus on the journey, not the destination. The value in Strategic Planning is not in the document that you produce. It is in the dialogue, discourse, and consensus that builds toward the direction you are headed. Don’t spend nine months trying to write the perfect document. Instead, spend two days mapping out the best journey based upon a clear destination (i.e., buy, sell, develop leadership, add markets, add services, eliminate services, etc.).

• Define accountability. The best plan means nothing unless there is accountability. Don’t leave the table without defining accountability and actions for various components of the plan. This is often difficult, but without it, passengers along for the trip are likely to get sick—sick of promises not kept and goals not achieved.

Today’s competitive firms are strategic, thoughtful, and deliberate. Gone are the days where “winging it” could get you on the right road to your destination. Today, winging it is likely to send you coasting down an uneven side road, while others who have planned their trip enjoy a road well-traveled.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the November 2012 issue of Professional Services Management Journal. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.