Some of you may be familiar with the concept of Strategic Planning and others of you may be asking:

"What the heck is strategic planning and why bother?"

Good question!

Strategic planning is about looking at your life and business from a BIG PICTURE - the proverbial "30,000 foot perspective" (unless of course, you're afraid of heights... but I digress).

Many business owners are so engrossed working "IN" their business that they don't take time to work "ON" their business.  They're so busy doing the daily to-do lists they don't take the time to ask themselves some very important questions such as:

• "What am I uniquely best at in my business?"
• "What can I delegate/outsource?"
• "What are my biggest opportunities?"
• "Who are my ideal clients?"
• "What clients should I let go of?"
• "What one thing, that I'm not doing now, would have the biggest impact on my business if I started to do it?"
• Who do I need to hire, fire or relocate/reassign?

Failing to answer these questions on a regular basis will virtually guarantee that your business will start to stall out.  If you find that your business is not growing like you want it to, or that it's becoming too much work and not enough fun, you're spending too much time IN and not enough time ON your business.

Why does this happen? 

When you first started out in business, you were rewarded for completing tasks - doing a job, filling out invoices, performing your services, selling your goods.  These things have a short time frame and require little forward thinking. 

What most people don't realise is that as they mature in business, they need to start looking at larger and larger time frames and directing others to do the short time frame tasks in alignment with a larger time frame.

I know one business owner, who, despite considerable success, still spends time packing and shipping products several hours a week.  Time that would be much better spent, creating the vision for the company and growing it at that level.

When developing a strategic plan for your business, you'll likely run into 2 large challenges:

1. How to create a plan that takes all the different elements of your business into account at the same time, in such a way that you can see how they interconnect and interact.
2. How to articulate that vision to your people in such a way that they understand the larger vision and how they fit into it.  Leaders by their nature, tend to be big picture thinkers.  Employees, by their nature tend to think in shorter time frames and smaller task oriented chunks.