Introduction to Business Planning and Strategy

Growing a business means taking many decisions about the way you want to expand your operations. Creating a strategic plan is a key component of planning for growth.

It will help you prepare a realistic vision for the future of your business and in doing so can maximize your business’ potential for growth.

The purpose of strategic planning is to set your overall goals for your business and to develop a plan to achieve them. It involves stepping back from your day-to-day operations and asking where your business is headed and what its priorities should be.

A strategic plan should not be confused with a business plan. A business plan is about setting short- or mid-term goals and defining the steps necessary to achieve them.

A strategic plan is typically focused on a business’ mid- to long-term goals and explains the basic strategies for achieving them.

A strategic business plan is a written document that pairs the objectives of a company with the needs of the market place. Although a strategic business plan contains similar elements of a traditional plan, a strategic plan takes planning a step further by not only defining company goals but utilizing those goals to take advantage of available business opportunities.

This is achieved by carefully analyzing a particular business industry and being honest about your company’s strength and weakness in meeting the needs of the industry.

Strategic management, strategizing for short, is essentially about choice—in terms of what the organization will do and won’t do to achieve specific goals and objectives, where such goals and objectives lead to the realization of a stated mission and vision. Strategy is a central part of the planning function in P-O-L-C. Strategy is also about making choices that provide an organization with some measure of competitive advantage or even a sustainable competitive advantage.

For the most part, this chapter emphasizes strategy formulation (answers to the “What should our strategy be?” question) as opposed to strategy implementation (answers to questions about “How do we execute a chosen strategy?”).

In this course, you will learn about strategic management and how it fits in the P-O-L-C framework. You will also learn some of the key internal and external analyses that support the development of good strategies.

Finally, you will see how the concept of strategy can be applied to you personally, in addition to professionally.

Completing this course should take you approximately 5 hours. Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the foundational principles and objectives of business planning and strategy;
• Identify the foundational strategy concepts, assumptions, or principles through the analysis of P-O-L-C framework.

Course Curriculum