• Starting a new business?
• Or thinking of expanding the current one?
• Stakeholders at your backs to streamline your business strategy?

Whatever the reason may be that you’re here, you are looking for an effective way to formulate a business strategy. Curating a business strategy from scratch requires meticulous analysis of past performance, setting business priorities, and determining your product development roadmap.

An all-inclusive online course in management can help you do just that. Until you decide to enrol in one, why don’t you keep on reading to cover the basics of creating an effective business strategy…

Step 1: Gather All the Facts

In order to know where your organisation is heading, you need to know where it is right now. So before you start looking at the long-term plans, take a step back and review the past performance or current situation of your organisation or process.

Look at each area very carefully, determine what worked well, which area needs improvement, and what opportunities lie ahead. There are several popular tools and techniques that can help you, like SWOT analysis. This tool helps you look at your process’s strengths, weaknesses, possible threats, and lucrative opportunities. And not just that, you should also look at external factors affecting the process, including political, social, economic, technological, legal, and environmental.

For expert guidance, of course, you can enrol for a credible online course in management. IIM, an ivy league institution, is offering one such online course. The general management program from IIM offered on the Talentedge platform can help you develop an effective business strategy from ground zero.

Step 2: Develop a Vision Statement

Your organisation’s vision statement must lay down the direction in which the organisation is headed along with its aims and mediums to achieve set goals. It should also describe the organisation’s core purpose and values. Business leaders have debated long and hard about what comes first, the vision or the mission statement. But, from a practical standpoint, you could develop both at the same time.

Not to sound repetitive, but an online course in management can actually help you understand the facets you need to look at before curating your organisation’s vision statement.

Step 3: Devise a Mission Statement

A mission statement should define your organisation’s purpose and outline its primary functions and objectives. It should focus on what needs to be done in the short term while realising its long-term vision. So, here are some of the questions you want to ask while curating a mission statement for your organisation:-

• What does your organisation do?
• How do they do it?
• Whom do they do it for?
• What value does your organisation bring to the table?

After you’ve obtained answers to these questions, you can move on to the next phase of your business strategy:-

Step 4: Identify Strategic Objectives

At this stage, your aims should be to develop a set of high-level objectives for every area of your business ranging from production, sales, marketing, to finance and supply chain. You need to highlight the priorities, communicate the plans with the stakeholders and ensure delivery of the company’s mission and vision to every department.

Simply put, the objectives set by you must be Specific, Measurable, Realistic, and Time-related (SMART). Furthermore, these must take into account factors such as KPI’s, resource allocation, and budget requirements.

The general management program from IIM can help you understand everything, ranging from allocating resources and the role & importance of financial management in a business organisation. So rest assured, comprehensive, and quality education is a no-brainer with this course from IIM.

Step 5: Formulate Tactical Plans

Now it’s time to put everything you’ve gathered and analysed into action.

At this stage of curating a business strategy, you need to translate the strategic objectives into more detailed and short-term plans. Basically, the purpose is to break down the big and fancy objectives into small and achievable goals for the employees.

So you need to include all the departments and functions of your organisation, including suppliers, marketers, IT personnel, and any other workforce that is being affected by your business strategy. And not just that, you also need to focus on measurable results and communicate them to stakeholders.

And finally, you need to formulate these tactical plans as short sprints to execute the strategy practically.

This stage requires careful consideration of every factor in place. One misstep and the consequences can be catastrophic. It is an excellent idea to gain some expert guidance right about now. This is where an online course in management can come in handy. These courses can help you understand the working of every facet of the business ranging from how supply chain management helps in business to ways through which you can achieve maximum customer satisfaction.

Step 6: Performance Management

All the planning and hard work you’ve put in up until now will go to waste if you forget about this stage. It is vital to constantly review all objectives and action plans to ensure your organisation is still on track to achieve the long term goals.

You can start by capturing the relevant information, breaking down large chunks of data into meaningful insights, planning, prioritising, and laying down clear parameters to compare the actual results.

You Are Not Ready Quite Yet

You’ve got the outline of what a business strategy looks like; a deep theoretical and practical understanding is what you need to formulate a robust one.

An accredited course in management can help you thrive every step of the business strategy. The general management program from IIM is a good course for management professionals, functional managers poised for career growth, business heads seeking to gain structured knowledge of business management, and entrepreneurs who desire to gain practical skills across different management arenas.

Ranging from management, data analytics, financial management, marketing management to HRM and strategic management, this course covers the A-Z of business management.

So what are you waiting for? Scour the Talentedge website for the general management program from IIM and enrol yourself TODAY!