10 steps to building business strategies and strategy development

Author Marc Emmer

In a world where CEOs are overcaffeinated, stressed and time-starved, many have been romanced by easy-to-use strategic business plan templates that yield a quick-and-dirty business strategy. However, downloading a template tends to promote short-sighted thinking and poorly-executed strategies. The result is often something closer to a short-term operational plan than a true strategy.

Vistage members are focusing more and more on execution, as well they should. Hiring the wrong people or implementing an ERP based on faulty assumptions can be costly.

Strategic planning, and even visioning, cannot be casually ideated in a few hours. Often, strategic planning is associated with completing a SWOT analysis. Participants show up for an all-day meeting and end up with a list of opportunities including imprecise strategies, such as “expand internationally.” Their list is void of any market analysis, research and business intelligence. When their ill-conceived tactics fail, they blame the strategy.

What is a business strategy?

A business strategy is a roadmap or plan that establishes your goals and the actions or steps needed to achieve the end goal. These guiding principles should be shared throughout the organisation to help your company reach its objectives.

Developing a business strategy in 10 steps

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are 10 steps you can take for building business strategies and executeing them with precision:

Understanding Business-Level Strategies

To craft a strong business strategy, understanding business-level strategies is essential. These strategies define how a company competes within its industry or market, guiding decisions to meet customer needs, outperform competitors, and achieve organisational goals. Companies can adopt approaches like:

• Differentiation: Standing out with unique products or services that deliver distinct value to customers.
• Cost Leadership: Streamlining resources to offer competitive pricing without compromising quality.
• Market Focus: Concentrating efforts on a specific segment to address customer needs better than competitors.

These strategies act as a foundation for building a competitive edge while ensuring alignment with broader organisational objectives.

1. Develop a true vision.

Vision is an abstract word that means different things to different people. Classically, a vision or vision statement is a snapshot into the future. It should include aspirations of what type of company you want to be, and, unlike a mission statement, articulates what success looks like in clear terms (customers, markets, volume, etc.).

Setting a vision and defining SMART Goals

A compelling business strategy starts with a vision—defining what success looks like and ensuring it resonates across the organization. To make this vision actionable, it’s crucial to translate it into Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-bound (SMART) goals. These goals create clarity and direction, ensuring every department understands its role in achieving the company’s overarching objectives.

For example, instead of simply aiming to “expand internationally,” a SMART goal would be: “Enter two new markets in Q3, achieving $1M in revenue by the end of the year.” Clear, actionable goals like this align teams and ensure progress is measurable.

Implementing business strategies with precision

Effective implementation is the bridge between strategy and results. Here’s how to ensure success:

• Communicate Clearly: Share strategic objectives at all levels so everyone understands their role in execution.
• Monitor Progress: Use aligned key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress and make data-driven adjustments.
• Empower Teams: Equip employees with the tools, training, and resources needed to succeed.
• Stay Adaptable: Build flexibility into your strategy to respond effectively to market changes or unforeseen challenges.

2. Define competitive advantage.

At the essence, business development strategy is identifying how a company can deliver unique value to its customers. In many sectors of the economy, companies are stuck in a sea of sameness. A well-thought-out business strategy should consider how a company can create space from competition in its service offering, pricing model, delivery system and more.

See: 21 Ways to Differentiate Any Brand and The Silicon Valley Playbook

3. Define your targets.

One of the most significant barriers to a strategic business plan is poor targeting. Absent of very specific targets, companies suffer from unclear messaging and thus misalignment between sales and marketing. Defining niches and specialties allows companies to focus resources (of course, some companies are generalists by design).

Clear target markets give a company the ability to create an integrated sales and marketing approach, where marketing enables sales productivity. Sales and marketing plans are executed more effectively when targets are tight.

4. Focus on systematic growth.

As one of our Vistage member clients says, “A thriving company is a growing company.” It is only through growth that companies can afford to invest in things like technology, the best people and new equipment. The strategic plan should identify in which segments a company will grow and in what proportion, so that the product mix yields a specific net margin result.

Only after coming to such conclusions could a company know how much it can afford in terms of capex, overhead expenses and so on.

5. Make fact-based decisions.

Strategy is a garbage in, garbage out exercise. Executives often complain about a lack of good data, but we consistently find information that is useful in the formation of business strategy.

We once worked with a Vistage member who was trying to quantify the value of various segments served. By accessing the public records of a nearby port, we were able to quantify actual shipments of merchandise by potential customers.

6. Long-term strategic business plan.

In the face of constant change, planning horizons are shorter than they used to be. However, only thinking quarter to quarter is a trap that may rob companies of their ability to see around the bend. Best-in-class companies create processes designed to treat strategy as an annual cycle rather than a one-time, static event.

7. Flexible strategy development.

Companies can think long term and still be flexible. For example, a critical component of business strategy development is an external forces analysis. Companies should be evaluating long-term external forces, and adapting based on new information (meeting regularly-perhaps quarterly) to pivot.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon holds a strategy meeting every Tuesday to keep it front and centre with his management team.

8. Be strategically inclusive.

To be flexible, companies are including different people in their strategy than in the past. At a time when companies are hiring more millennial employees, there is greater transparency. While I am never one to advocate that companies open their books (as that is a personal decision for the entrepreneur), there is certainly movement toward more inclusion and transparency.

Deciding who to include in strategy formation is a critical selection. We recommend business owners include people they can trust and that can think strategically.

9. Invest time in pre-work.

If you want your managers to take strategy seriously, make them conduct research and prepare relevant information in advance of your strategy meetings.

10. Measure your results and execute excellently.

Every strategy should be actionable. Companies that are best-in-class:

• Have a strategic action plan that they track often (usually monthly).
• Promote common ownership of the plan across executives and departments.
• Utilise key performance indicators (KPIs) that are predictive and align directly with the strategic plan.
• Have cascading goals that reach every department and resonate with employees so they understand how their role contributes to the greater good.
• Set up their corporate calendar to promote productive meetings, and establish a performance management cycle that supports cascading goals and objectives to every employee.
• Rinse and repeat their strategy cycle every year.

Things to know for successfully building business strategies:

Creating a winning business strategy can help you position your organisation as a market leader. Here’s what you need to know to successfully build a business strategy for your company.

How to write a business strategy?

A successful business strategy begins with formalising a plan around three core elements: business objectives, target audience and strategic management. Use these six action items to begin writing an effective business strategy that aligns with your organization’s goals.

• Consider your organisation’s mission and vision statements
• Identify your company’s core values
• Conduct a SWOT analysis
• Outline tactics to achieve goals
• Create a plan for allocating resources to achieve the desired outcome
• Evaluate results for effectiveness

The execution of business strategic planning requires discipline, and it is the responsibility of senior executives to promote processes that keep a team focused on the prize.

Originally published on Vistage Research Center.