How To Develop A Successful Corporate Business Strategy
15th August 2019
Before setting up a business, you will need to develop a corporate business strategy that should highlight the sum of your business parts. As a business leader, you will face numerous challenges when making decisions that will influence the direction your business takes. Your strategy will help you to make decisions about who to hire, how to spend funds and how to prioritise your time effectively.
Most businesses prepare for these hurdles by developing a corporate strategy that provides all necessary guidelines to help with the decision-making process. A corporate strategy is essentially a handbook, a guide to help you manage all your business operations and achieve particular goals. A corporate strategy will rank you highly amongst your competitors. It will help you become a leader in innovation, or a low cost provider, or a business focus on different needs of customers. Each strategy, depending on the type of business requires a different mindset and approach to business operations. Yet they all have a key similarity, which is, they all have a well-informed business plan to help answer essential business-related questions about the products or services they provide.
Follow this guide for information on how you can create a vision and ensure the long-term success of your company by creating a corporate strategy that works for you.
Components of a Business Plan
Although most strategic plans vary depending on the type and size of business, they all have important components that should be followed chronologically, to help structure the beginnings of your corporate strategy.
- Name and Address of Business
- Mission Statement
- Vision Statement
- Outline of Business Values
- SWOT Analysis: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
- Competitive Advantage
- USP – Unique Selling Point
- Long-term Objectives
- Strategies
- Short-term Goals/initiatives
- Action Plan
- Financial Plan/Assessment
- Evidence/Appendices – Business Bank Statements, Competitor Research etc.
- Now answer these key questions: Where is your business now? Where do you aim to be in the long-term? How will you get there?
Types of Business Strategy
- Growth Strategy – This is the most popular type of business strategy, aimed at helping boost company revenue and earnings growth.
- Global Strategy – This type of strategy is concerned with defining new ways to reach a variety of geographical markets and audiences worldwide.
- E-business Strategy – E-business strategies are focused on growth and expansion in a digital context. Keeping up with the global economy online.
- Value-creating Strategy – Elimination competition by gaining increased market share.
- Product Differentiation Strategy – Setting a business apart from their key competitors by offering a unique, quality product or service to have a competitive advantage over others.
Source: Forbes.com
- Clarify Your Strategy – Your strategy needs to be understood by everyone, even the outsider or member of the public. Make sure it is not full of business jargon and can be made sense of to those not in business.
- Communicate Your Strategy – Communicate your strategy with others, by sharing it across digital platforms, sending copies to your employees via email and expressing how the strategy will aid business success in regular team meetings. Conduct customer surveys, to find out if they understand and admire your new focus and direction and whether it will influence their decision to invest in your products and services in the future.
- Cascade Your Strategy – Consult with managers and task them with putting your corporate plan into action across all departments to make your strategy quickly become a reality.
Why Corporate Strategies Are Important for Business
- Defining your corporate strategy is essential for helping those in managerial roles to make decisions that align with the overall needs of the company. Without a plan in place, it is easy to veer off track in terms of the direction you wish your business to take. Corporate strategies are also important for other employees, as it helps them to understand business values. They can therefore, make sure their role within the company helps achieve company goals.If a corporate strategy fulfills its purpose then it will greatly improve your business long-term and can be used to accomplish a number of goals, and boost financial success. It will also help to accelerate growth, increase profits, reduce costs and eradicate counterproductive individuals or resources.
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