The Right Tree In Business (PT 3)

Strategy Formulation

This is a key process required in managing your business. It is the strategic process of examining your market and devising suitable mediums of attracting clients or customers. Lasting strategies can ensure resale or referral.

A strategy is what you need compete successfully and then survive. Formulating strategy is an integral process of business development as it blends with the process of ensuring the scalability of your idea. It is therefore advisable that the first template strategies be developed before establishing your business, or during the design phase of your business model.

Strategy formulation is an important part of business development as most of the processes executed throughout the lifetime of the business are developed here, or at least created here, and modified subsequently.

Follow these steps to formulate your business strategies.

1. Conduct a thorough research on all existing strategies. You can break your work into manageable bits to account for

• Competitor’s business strategies (document them).
• Market acceptability and reach of existing strategies.
• Specific market benefit from each strategy.

2. Document, reform, re-model these strategies. Some strategies may not be adaptable to your business due to its location, process or market. That a strategy worked well for a competitor does not mean you will get similar result from employing them. It is important to adapt a strategy to your particular business, considering the prevailing circumstance such as staffing, market exposure of business etc.

3. Create new strategies. Your findings from the research will help you determine if new strategies will be required to win your market. Often, this is the case for new entrants to a market.

4. Define all activities to be daily done in executing these strategies. This will effectively create job descriptions or openings for your firm. You will from this know what skills you need in your business.

NB:

• Strategy formulation may lead to product redesign and other major business management/policy adjustment. These will forge part of new formulated strategies for your business.
• Some strategies may already be counter-productive to your competitors. You will need to know why and weather it will be consistent with your firm should your employ them also.