Creating a Technology Business Plan & Strategic Plan
Imagine a world without technology—it’s almost impossible.
Science, industry, medicine, entertainment… every aspect of our modern lives is influenced by the advent of new technology. Breakthroughs in the technology business are constantly redefining the human experience.
For over 30 years, I’ve helped technology business owners and entrepreneurs create strategic plans to launch, grow, and expand their businesses into larger markets. Many of these clients have gone on to achieve tremendous success. In this blog, you’ll learn how any size tech company can benefit from industry-specific strategic planning.
The Unique Challenges of Creating a Tech Business Plan
The need for quick pivots and agility in the tech industry requires a strategic plan that can adapt rapidly to market changes and customer needs. This is a unique challenge. That’s why I integrate flexibility into each strategic plan to ensure that tech companies—from startups to industry leaders—remain nimble and responsive. By aligning a group’s strategic goals with their need for agility and innovation, I facilitate plans that allow a tech business to embrace change while staying focused on their overarching vision.
How to Develop Your Tech Company’s Business Plan
Developing a business plan for your technology company is an essential component for reaching your goals and sustaining your success. But it’s not a do-it-yourself project. I strongly suggest working with an outside expert who will work with your leadership team every step of the way. As a collaborative facilitator, I fully utilize your team’s combined expertise to better understand your industry, competition, and customers.
Using an innovative process called StratOp, I guide organizations into a business plan designed to accelerate growth, evaluate existing systems, and improve the chances of success in the fast-changing marketplace. This proprietary StratOp process produces a “living document” that will be updated and revised as your tech company evolves, grows, and branches out.
Regardless of size, every tech business needs to set priorities, focus resources, and ensure that its entire staff is working toward common goals. To get started, I generally work with leaders in gathering perspective, identifying the group’s existing strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities, objectives, and resources.
Next, I help identify clearly understood action steps that will best enable the company to advance its mission. Working in sync, we jointly develop a plan that the entire team agrees on. When it’s approved, we prioritize the steps, commit to measurable goals, and begin implementing the plan.
By committing to long-range interaction with the tech business, I return to revisit the strategy on an ongoing basis as the internal and external environments change.
The Six Phases of Strategic Planning
Experience is the best teacher, and I have a strong background in coaching and consulting technology businesses of various sizes—all with different specialties and customer targets. I do so by guiding across six vital phases…
- Perspective: “Where Are We Now?” We begin by defining current realities. “Perspective before planning” is how successful tech companies make brilliant, informed decisions.
- Core plan: “Where Are We Headed?” Equipped with proper context, a tech business can now develop a living core strategic plan based on a set of shared fundamental beliefs upon which to develop this plan.
- Action: “What’s Important Now?” Time to move on to key issues as one cross-functional group. The team-developed core plan is the basis for creating a unified action plan aligned with the master plan.
- Structure: “What Form Best Facilitates the Plan?” With the action plan in place, I help ensure that your organizational structure, culture, systems, processes, and staffing all support the plan.
- Management: “How Are We Doing?” As your strategic planning facilitator, I help administer a systematic feedback loop to manage plan implementation. Regular monthly and quarterly reviews are instituted.
- Renewal: “What Needs to Change?” Team leadership meets annually to review and renew the core strategic plan. Action items, opportunities, trends, objectives, and goals are all reset for the coming year.
To ensure success and sustainability, my involvement is ongoing.
Tips for Creating a Technology Strategic Plan
It may seem thrifty to try and create a strategic plan on your own. But it often backfires. My advice is to choose an outside facilitator to guide you. This partnership actually saves you time, money, and huge opportunity costs. Best of all, an objective, outside facilitator creates a safe space where honest dialogue and candid feedback is welcomed rather than thwarted. An unbiased strategic planning facilitator like myself will ensure that everyone participates equally.
Because of personal dynamics, leadership teams can’t always move their own planning group toward consensus. When this happens, team members can shut down. Using the exclusive StratOp process, I develop an actionable technology business plan that allows companies to set (and reach) measurable and achievable goals for growth. Each unique plan is a detailed “roadmap” for a multi-year time span. The plan outlines the company’s overall goals, and develops tactics to support those goals in alignment with the organization’s overall business objectives.
Strategic Planning at Large Technology Companies
When it comes to strategic planning, one size does not fit all. Large technology companies need bigger ideas, higher levels of expertise, and more out-of-the-box thinking. That’s where leadership coaches like myself come in. More than ever, today’s emerging technology, globalization, and increased competition mean that top-tier tech companies need experienced consultants with proven competency and character.
Creating a Tech Startup Business Plan
Starting your own business can be rewarding. Stories of self-made millionaires fuel the drive to “be your own boss.” In the US alone, over three million startups are launched each year.
The bad news is that 90 percent of all startups—including newborn technology companies—will fail. Technology startups crash and burn for many reasons, from insufficient funding to lack of business skills and ineffective marketing strategies.
A major contributor to failing is the lack of a strategic plan. In a sense, coming up with a great new idea is the easy part. The hard part is nurturing, supporting and marketing that raw creativity to the world with an effective business plan. Relying on a strategic planning facilitator like myself to create and help execute a winning strategy is often what separates the startups who make it from the 90 percent who don’t.
Studies show that the most profitable technology startups do use strategic planning to direct their initial (and most critical) phase of growth and development. Tech startups without a strategic plan are usually led by an intelligent prodigy who has great technical skills, but lacks the business acumen required to stay afloat. This lack of strategic awareness not only hinders economic growth, it threatens the company’s survival.
Let's Get Started
If you’ve read this far, you’re perhaps open to the idea of touching base with a strategic planning facilitator.
If so, great! Based on my experience, I’d say the important thing now is to find a consultant who’s a good fit. While there are plenty of talented business coaches out there, the goal is finding one that’s right for your organization. To discuss the possibility of working together, contact me, and I’ll be happy to set up a relaxed, informal conversation.