Strategic Planning the Business That I Want Essay

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Strategic Planning

The business that I want to start is a small barbeque and soul food restaurant. This business will have one location to begin with. The business will be defined by the quality of the food and the fun, comfortable atmosphere of the restaurant. This paper will first explain the benefits of strategic planning, and then outline some of the strategic plan for my new restaurant.

Strategic planning is "an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working towards common goals and ensure that the organization is setting its direction in relation to the external environment (BSI, 2013). Thus, strategic planning begins with a mission and vision for the company and what it wants to accomplish. These things underpin the actions and directions that the company wants to take.

There are several different elements of the strategic plan. These include the mission, the vision, the overall strategic direction, the tactics and the controls. There are also a number of pitfalls that can trip up a company that is trying to put together an effective strategic plan. For example, many plans are bogged down by vague or fuzzy language. Ashkenas (2013) notes that common phrasing such as "leverage our world class operating capabilities" or other such language actually says nothing about what the company is going to do, and how it will do it. So for a restaurant you cannot just talk about having "the best food, great service and a fun atmosphere," you actually need to have a sense of what these words mean in order to have an actionable strategy.

The strategy description also needs to be specific and proactive. Tough questions should not be avoided and there should be embedded in the strategic plan enough clarity and sense of purpose that everyone at the company understands what is necessary to achieve these objectives. Conerly (2013) highlights the importance of having a strategy that has clear actionable plans -- if the actions that derive from the strategy are vague then they are insufficient and this is a problem for the overall strategy. So when designing the strategy for this restaurant we want to have a very specific vision in mind of who we are, what we do and how we are going to do it. Only then can the strategy be devised and executed properly.

So a strategic plan is important to the success of the business in a couple of ways. First, it defines the business. You must know who you are and where you are going. Second, the strategic plan defines the terms of success. No business can claim to be a success if it has no idea what success is. The definition of success will be embedded in the mission, the vision and the strategy. Furthermore a strategic plan will have specific success measures, so it is clear that by having success measures the company can work to those measures.

Four Functions of Management

The four functions of management are planning, organizing, leading and controlling (Norman, 2013). Planning is obviously embedded in strategic management, but the other elements are as well. Planning requires having a strategy in mind, because the strategy is going to guide the direction of the plan. However, organizing is also closely linked to the strategic management process. When there is a strategic plan in place, strategic organizing requires that there be an organizing of resources in order to execute the plan. Thus, having a broad vision for the company provides specific guidance to the company with respect to how it should use its resources.

Leading is another critical element. There are two areas where leading intersects with strategic management. The first is that strategic management provides the guidepost for where the leader should be guiding the company. Leadership implies that there must be a direction in which one is being lead, and the strategic plan provides that direction. Strategic management is essential the combination of leadership and resource deployment. Leadership works less with the resources that it does with the mission and vision part of the strategy. The company is able to be motivated by strong leadership and that is something that can only be provided by strategic management

Finally, controlling is based on the strategic plan. Where the strategic plan provides the company with objectives, the control process is where the measures that were set out in the management plan are evaluated against the actual results.

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Management uses this evaluation to identify areas of weakness and then adjust the strategy. So this is a critical factor in the success of the company, to use the success measures that were identified in the strategic plan as a control mechanism.

Mission and Vision

For the restaurant, it is important to have a mission and vision to guide employees. In this industry, people can become complacent in their work easily if they are not motivated by a greater vision. So the mission statement is:

"To be recognized as the best barbeque and soul food restaurant in the state, and be a known brand at the national level. This will be accomplished on the basis of our food and service. We want perfect scores from all our customers."

The vision "Every customer leaves with a full stomach and a big smile."

The mission statement has elements of the obvious -- every restaurant wants to have good food and service and needs those things in order to stay in business. However, the mission statement goes a bit further by providing a definition to those concepts. We want to win awards, get written up in the media, and we want to look on Yelp and Trip Advisor and see those perfect scores. So we have clear success measures that derive from the mission and we can always work towards these things.

The vision represents the ideal world in which we live. We are committed to this vision of our customer, which encapsulates both the need to cook amazing food but also to provide the sort of service that has everybody leaving with a smile. When you envision this as how your restaurant must be, it will keep you on your toes.

These elements also help to differentiate what we do. There is the basic differentiation by identifying what we do (barbeque and soul food) but there is also the fact that we want to be #1 on the review sites, so we are committed to outperforming our competitors. Unstated but implied here is that we will very much be benchmarking our business against the competition, seeing it through the eyes of the customers. We feel that from an operating standpoint this is a way to differentiate how we do business, and we think that aiming to be the best puts us clearly in the category of a company with a differentiated strategy.

The only major thing that this mission and vision do not have is a clear understanding of our customers. While one can infer that being the best will draw a wide range of customers -- most restaurants do that -- we need to have a better sense of who are target customer is. I suspect that for any company with a diversified customer base there is a disinclination to specify a target market. We might cater primarily to African-Americans, or to families, but we are not in a position as a startup restaurant to strictly define our audience. In a sense, the mission statement eschews target marketing because we want everybody to be welcome, to love our food and I think that when you are number one in the state you are going to attract everybody and anybody. I mean, seriously, who doesn't love barbeque? Even a vegetarian can dig black eyed peas and collards and macaroni and cheese. I think part of what I wanted to convey is that we make everybody happy.

Guiding Principles

Excellence has to be the number one guiding principles and the customers are going to define that for us. We want to have a culture that is like a backyard barbeque, loud social and everybody having fun. This we want to embed deeply into the strategy because it is not always easy to create that vibe unless you work at it.

In terms of social responsibility and ethics, that is not something we put in the mission statement, but we do want to have an ethics statement. We are an equal opportunity face-stuffer -- anybody can work here and anybody can eat here. It's that simple. Respect for everybody, for the community and for the environment. It's a simple concept that some people act like it's complicated, but respect is not complicated.

The mission and vision guide us towards competitive advantage because the benchmarking puts us directly against the competition. We are going to specifically be better than them, and that is how we will win competitive advantage. In the restaurant business,.....

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