Executing Your Strategic Plan

The most important aspect of your Social Media-related business plan, (or any business plan for that matter), is not the plan itself … it’s the execution of that plan.  After all, the business planning process is typically a cost item, not a direct addition to your bottom line.  It’s only in the proper execution of your plan that revenue is finally generated.  Planning and execution are obviously related (you can’t have the latter without the former, for example), but they do require a different set of skills and different action steps.

1. Set a practical review schedule, and adhere to it religiously.

Set a specific time (you can be flexible here, as long as it is periodic and regular), communicate the time to all stakeholders, and then keep those appointments.  It is not acceptable to miss taking this periodic medicine, whether it goes down easily or not.  If you miss it once, it’s much easier to miss it again, and so on until there is no review at all.  No review is a near guarantee of failure.

2. Set the business objectives

These objectives must have a clear relevance to the mission, which presumably is to make a profit, generate cash flow, improve customer relations, generate brand awareness or other worthy goals.  If the objectives are not clear at this point, they are the wrong objectives.

3. Set specific concrete steps

Execution means making things happen.  If improving cash flow is the objective, it should be obvious what measurable steps should occur and in which order to make that happen.

Don’t make the mistake of developing top-down steps as you flesh out these objectives.  In other words, don’t simply pick a number out of the air for cash flows (1% of the market sounds reasonable, for example), instead work upwards to the end result from obvious building blocks:  How many potential customers can we reach in a given period of time? How many can we meet with under favorable circumstances in that same period of time?  How many can we reasonably expect to close?  What will the average sale deliver in cash, and when?

4. Match tasks to owners.

Always match the outcome with a specific individual.  John Kennedy once said, “…failure is an orphan and success has a thousand fathers.”  Never execute strategy by committee.  Assign tasks to individuals and then hold them (and no one else) accountable.   This approach, if properly communicated to everyone concerned, results in true accountability and solid execution.

5. Develop useful metrics.

Measurement is an often overlooked necessity, especially at the line-item level.  If you miss your major objective for the month, you need to know why if you’re planning not to fail again next month.  And the only way to accomplish this is through the numbers.  Metrics means specific, concrete numbers so you can track whether you’re on plan or not.

6.  Execute

Tim Berry, of Palo Alto Software has made the observation:  “All business plans are wrong, but nonetheless vital; because if you didn’t have the plan, you wouldn’t know how to correct, and how assumptions have changed. The result is steering, and management.”  This is a valid, even profound idea.  Your business plan is not a college paper with a grade given by your professor.  It is an action document graded by three characteristics only:  Did you make the objective?  If not, why not?  And finally, if not, what needs to change?

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