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How does a Nigerian company come up with workable strategies for the short term? If you’re an entrepreneur building a venture, you’re probably asking this question a lot. In this article, we’ll lay out the steps to designing them.
Step 1: Get Clear on Your Greater Goals
Your short term business strategies are, ideally, just building blocks for your company’s greater goal. They are the steps you must take to get to your desired destination. You can visualize them as your business’s journey to its ultimate state, broken down into smaller portions. So, figuring out your short term strategy should begin with defining the bigger, longer term picture for your business. Where do you want it to be in the next 5-10 years, or further into the future? That picture has to be as detailed as possible: financial, structural, reach and impact, brand image, etc.Step 2: Break Down into Shorter Term Goals
After fleshing out your ultimate goals, your next step would be to break them down into a series of shorter term aims. It’s these aims that your short term strategies will exist to achieve. Pick one or a few of those aims, precisely the ones that correspond with the next steps for your business. They are the targets you’ll be moving towards with whatever strategies you draw up.Step 3: Identify Your Company’s Needs
Your short term strategies should exist to cover your company’s need at its present stage of development. And those needs are defined by the goals we referred to in step 2 above. Identifying needs represents a further distillation, a sharpening of focus. Where goals are destinations, needs are the states of affairs you require to get you to them.Sign up for the Connect Nigeria daily newsletter
Step 4: Decide How You will Meet Those Needs
Next, determine the moves you’ll make to meet the needs you’ve identified in step 3. These “moves” are a part of your strategy. For example, let’s say your short term goal is capturing 0.5% of your market, and your need is conducting a marketing campaign that’ll enable you get that share. Your move would therefore be the things you’d have to do to execute that campaign.Step 5: Assign Tasks to Team Members
Here’s where your company’s team members get to contribute to your short term business strategy. Following the identification of the moves that have to be made, you may assign each of them to members of your team, based on their expertise. A marketing campaign (referred to in the previous step) would be the domain of the marketing team. Quite often, there will be multiple tasks to be done per need, so you’ll likely have several individuals or teams working on a need.Step 6: Come Up with a Comprehensive Picture
With your goals, needs, tasks and assigned teams planned out, it’s time to put your plans in a comprehensive document. That’ll be your short term business strategy in writing. This strategy document will serve as a guide for you and your team, a reference piece that points the way and tells you what to do at every point of the implementation journey.Step 7: Review and Adjust Your Strategy
Do note that your short term business strategy is subject to review and adjustments. That’s dependent on what you and your team observe as you go on with implementation. Certain facts which were previously unknown or poorly perceived may become crystal clear; the need for changes to your plans could become evident with time. You will only know for sure if you’re closely tracking the execution and outcomes of your strategy.Register to attend the CN Business Mixer
Final Words
Any business looking to grow has to have a strategy for achieving this. Sometimes, coming up with just such a strategy can be a daunting task. But with the right sort of planning and documentation (as we’ve laid out here), you’ll be able to design one that works well for your company.Got a suggestion? Contact us: editor@connectnigeria.com
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