It's strategic planning dog food time - Part 2!
This is the second installment of "It's strategic planning dogfood time" the first installment covered initial stages of how we used our RapidInfluence strategic plan implementation product to help us start our business.
Recapping: In the initial stages, we defined the key requirements of creating and launching a start-up business:
- Market Research (product)
- Define/Implement Operational Systems (operational)
- Develop/Implement Marketing Strategy (sales)
- Develop/Implement Sales Strategy (sales)
- Product development (product)
Additionally, we were able to divide these plan elements into product, sales and operational components. As you will notice from both the original blog post and our Manifesto we believe that it's all about actions and our action item mix ended up being 25% operational, 50% sales and 25% product oriented action items:
- 5 action items for operations:
- Implement Google Enterprise Apps
- Implement CRM Solution
- Implement Corporate Website
- Implement HubSpot SEO system
- Implement a project management and collaboration system
- 10 action items for sales:
- Create initial marketing pieces
- Build presentation masters - ppt etc.
- Develop plan for white papers, position paper, manifesto
- Create and implement initial SEO strategy
- Create first social media connections
- Create initial Web site content
- Create Slideshare distributions
- Develop company brand/look and feel
- Create lead development plan
- Develop sales process document
- 5 action items for product:
- Contact and interact with initial focus groups
- Initial competitor matrix and tracking
- Develop initial product prototype
- Develop long-term product plan
- Set up delivery infrastructure
Given that we had been involved in more than one start-up over the last decade we were pleased to see that we had naturally (or should I say finally) allotted 50% of our strategic plan's action items towards sales focused activities, despite the normal tendency to lean towards crafting a perfect product a mistake that many including ourselves have made over time.
There were two other interesting facts that we discovered while implementing this plan and that was that action items have both short lives and long lives and 1st versions and 2nd versions. This realization got us to thinking about how we might track action items that live on past the initial completion of the action, at present there are a few ideas that are being mulled around and one of them will make it into the next product release of that you can be assured.
In addressing short versus long life activities we found that it was great if we could take short life tasks and knock them out very quickly with little time wasted on discussion or evaluation, as an example for the operational action item:
Set up Google Apps account for the company and setup initial email accounts, calendars etc.
There was little need to debate the idea nor compare products and once the action item was completed we would not have to revisit this for years, so it was knocked out quickly and put to rest. Some other items like creating a long-term product development plan and building a sales process document will take longer because both will be enhanced by the work we are doing with the initial focus group of users and early adopter customers, so we will be working on those action items over the coming months.
By contrast there are 1st and 2nd versions of action items where we knew that the 1st version of what we would do need not be perfect it just needed to be adequate and actioned as quickly as possible as an example, the operational action item:
Implement a project management and collaboration system.
In this case we were already familiar with a range of products from enterprise level through to small business solutions. We knew that we would eventually need more of an enterprise level solution in this area but we didn't want the extra time or expense and when the time comes we will be able to re-activate (new feature!) a past action and upgrade our capabilities. We ended up going with Basecamp a 37Signals product because it is simple to implement and does exactly what we need right now, which is essentially allow us to collaborate between ourselves and our customers.
At present we have completed 15 of 20 action items in our initial strategic plan with 4 of those action items requiring a second version review e.g. upgrading the CRM functions as well as project management and lead development programs. The un-finished items are falling into that category of long-term action items and will most likely take a few more months to complete.
So, that is a bit more on our dogfood experience to date. In the end we started talking about a new business and we forced ourselves to move from talking about it to identifying very specific actions and then implementing those actions. None of the plan elements or action items are really earth shattering and for the most part they have been straightforward to implement, what has made the difference is having a tool that we could use to bring it all together and follow it through.
Along those same lines the great thing about having created a plan in an online environment is that it is also easy for us to share that plan with other people as we have done in these two blog posts. In particular this plan is relevant for companies that are in a start-up or emerging growth phase. There are of course many other types of strategic plans and we look forward to sharing those as well.
Ed Loessi
