Most business owners are motivated by goals. They may not have clarity on what those goals are because they have not set aside time to think about it, document it, or consider the relative importance of various goals. Accounting businesses around the world are now using Strategize to step them through this important process and then extend it to clients as a new product offering.

The Strategize process begins by asking you to consider how important the following goals are to you in a specific timeframe:

Revenue

More revenue can help stabilize your business, attract bigger clients, attract capable employees, grow the reputation / status, lead to bigger profits and make the business more interesting to acquirers.

Profit

Profit can be distributed to owners and paid in bonuses to the team. It can also be reinvested into your business to generate growth.

Capacity

This refers to your efficiency. If you are maximizing the use of your resources, then your capacity is perfect. If your team could produce more, your capacity can be improved.

Community

Your reason for being in business may be somewhat driven by a goal to contribute or give back to your community (employees, their families, other stakeholders, charitable recipients etc.) or leave a legacy.

Lifestyle

Some owners are unhappy because they want to work less (and do other things). Others are unhappy because they want to do different things in the business (e.g. focus more on client management and less on administration).

Succession

You may consider a (partial) change in ownership of your business, e.g. selling to a third-party investor, a management buy-out, transferring ownership to a family member, liquidating the business.

It is rarely just one goal that is important. You can see from the above that goals are often interrelated. Strategize takes the approach of allocating 100 ‘chips’ across the six goals so that you can rank them in order of importance. It then stores that data as the starting point for developing a plan that makes sense for you.

The next step is to assess the current strengths and weaknesses of your business to gain an understanding of your business’s competencies. Extensive research has led to Panalitix boiling down everything that matters in a business into five key business areas:

Within those five business areas, there are a range of projects that you could work on at any point in time to build on your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses. To determine which of those projects make the most sense, you start by rating your business’s current competence in each one by allocating a score of 1 through 7. In this case, a 7 says ‘We’re brilliant!!’ and 1 says, ‘Oh dear, we need to look seriously at this!’

Of course, 1 and 7 are often the outliers and there is skill involved in delineating between various projects that might be rated 3 or 4. That’s why a session facilitated by Panalitix could help you to ensure you get the ratings right and prepare you for running similar sessions with clients.

Once the assessment of competences is complete, Strategize then stores this second dataset and compares it with the first (relative importance of goals.) Using an algorithm, it creates a prioritized project plan with associated timelines and displays the projects on a Gantt chart. The projects listed are the ones that will have the highest likelihood of moving your business towards its stated goals.

The algorithm has been tested in the field against over 100 live cases, where participants have assessed whether or not the projects appearing on the plan make sense. Where initially unusual results were reported, the algorithm was reviewed, tweaked where appropriate and redeployed so that we are now confident that it makes the data collected meaningful, thus guiding decision making in your business.

If you would like a demonstration of Strategize, please get in touch and one of our experts will schedule a time for an online meeting.