When you own a business, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of running your company and fail to look at the bigger picture.
However, to truly achieve long-term success, you need to separate strategy and operations, while having a clear plan for both. While these two areas of your business may seem similar, they serve distinct and equally important purposes.
Strategic vs Operational Plan
A strategic plan outlines the overarching vision, mission and high-level goals for your business. It answers the big-picture questions of where you want your company to go and why. This could include financial targets, growth objectives or an eventual exit strategy.
Your strategic plan provides the guiding light to keep your business on track towards its long-term aspirations.
Meanwhile, an operational plan focuses on the execution of that strategic vision. It delves into the specific, actionable steps required to bring the strategy to life.
An operational plan might include details around resource allocation, workflow processes, team structure and key performance indicators.
Where your strategic plan paints the broad strokes, the operational plan fills in the fine details.
Many business owners make the mistake of focusing solely on one plan or the other. They may have a clear strategic vision, but lack the operational roadmap to get there. Conversely, some become so buried in the day-to-day that they lose sight of the bigger picture.
The most successful companies strike a balance between the two, because when strategy and operations are aligned, magic can happen.
- Your strategic plan provides the “what” and the “why” – the overarching direction that the business is headed.
- Your operational plan then outlines the “how” and the “when” – the specific steps required to turn that vision into reality.
By bridging this gap, you can ensure that every activity, system, and process in your business is actively working towards your long-term goals.
How to leverage both plans to achieve your goals
Let’s say your strategic plan includes a revenue target of $10 million over the next 3 years.
Your operational plan would then detail the marketing campaigns, sales initiatives, product development milestones and financial management tactics needed to achieve that financial goal.
Without your operational roadmap, your strategic objective remains a pipe dream. But if you don’t have a strategic north star, operational efforts may be disjointed and lack purpose.
What’s the key to developing and implementing both plans? More often than not, it’s having a team around you. No business owner can be the ‘hands’ and the ‘brain’ of the business simultaneously and around the clock. It’s once you begin to effectively delegate and allocate responsibilities to the right people that you allow both plans to take shape effectively.
Read more: How to Design Your Dream Team and Plan Your Structure for Success
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