Why a Strategic Plan for Your Business Is a MUST

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Always super excited to be here with you and we are starting another three-part series. If you didn't catch the last one, it's all about preparing for, nailing, and mastering post-conference success. We even have access to a workshop with you here this in time that you can get access to. We'll have that link in the show notes if it's still relevant. If not, you can get on a waiting list for the next time that we host that workshop.

Really incredible moving into conference season or offseason, all these conferences that I know are popping up on our calendars, which ones do we go to? How do we make sure we get the most ROI? Today, we're talking about another thing that's going to be happening over the next several months for many of us.

For a lot of us, our companies are making that final push. We're really trying to get as much done as we can. Then we're moving into, at least in terms of operations and actually delivering, a slower season. Maybe we're more into maintenance, and it's also really great time to think about what are the big-picture things that my business needs me to think about.

What I want to talk to you today is the stall-and-die problem. You're either growing or you're stalling. If you're stalling, you're actually dying. This is going to be a three-part series like I mentioned, but first, let's talk about this phenomenon and really understand it.

I'm going to share some research. We are always doing research at Story Built because that's what we use to really inform the strategy that we're developing for our clients. We're researching them specifically, their partners, their customers as that early primary research.

We're also doing secondary research constantly of the overarching market, at their specific market and geographically by product, by service all of those kinds of things. We end up with a wealth of knowledge and helps us see the bigger picture and some trends in the industry.

For businesses, these are really important numbers to be thinking about. Studies show that 87% of businesses will experience a stall in growth. Somewhere in the 70% range are actually experiencing stall most of the time, which is incredible. But what's really incredible about this, because we think of this as it's just a little blimp in my business. This year, we were profitable.

But we need to be careful because it's also easy to get really complacent. It's also easy to really think like, “Oh, I'm just comfortable here. This is where we're going to stay,” or “In a few years, we'll focus more on growth again.” But what happens is the more years or the longer that you stay in any kind of stall pattern or within that range of a stall, you're actually getting close to failure.

Ten years of being in a stall pretty much means you are out of business. That's what studies show when we look at the data from this. It's really important to be thinking about “How do I stay on some form of growth trajectory all the time?” Because there are always new competitors coming in, there are always new trends you have to stay on top of. What are the real demands? How are your people consuming and learning about your goods?

All of those things can push you into a stall even though they feel like external factors. You have to know how you're going to be responding to those things. How do we respond to those things? Making a strategic growth plan should be a priority if you're wanting to prevent stall and therefore failure in your business.

Here's some more of the research that we've come across: companies that have just a simple basic initial written business plan actually grow 30% faster. That's not a living, dynamic, or disruptive strategic plan. That is just the initial written business plan. Just having that alone, and really putting it out into your business makes an incredible difference.

But let's talk about if you have a disruptive living and always evolving strategic plan. If you make having a strategy and implementing it effectively in your business and based on research, market research and data, internal primary research from your customers, partners, and the people directly influencing your business, you are actually 93% more capable of evolving and pivoting.

Companies that have a disruptive living strategy are 93% more likely to be able to pivot and disrupt constantly, always keeping them in a growth cycle. Here's another statistic, that really talks to and leans into this stall phenomenon that we see and it's 71% of fast-growing companies have a strategic plan.

Those companies that we know are using the strategic plan and updating it on a regular basis, 71% of them are actually growing, and they're the fastest-growing companies. They're growing at a faster rate than companies that maybe aren't using a strategic plan and updating it on a regular basis or just aren't using one at all.

Another dynamic that I think is really interesting and a stat that I found really interesting, especially because I'm getting a lot of requests, really apply the methods and the strategy of what we do to workforce problems because that's the biggest cause of stall for a lot of businesses these days is how do we recruit and retain and a lot of the strategy work, marketing work, sales work can actually be pivoted towards and pointed in that direction.

Another reason that I think is absolutely phenomenal when you think about what is the value of using a strategic plan is that 95% of employees don't feel like they understand or are clear on a company strategy. Research tells us that employees want to know what is the strategy, what is the end goal, how do I contribute to that?

If 95% don't understand what that strategy is, that leads to people not being very excited about staying in their job, not being very motivated. But also, if they're directly linked to that, they know how they impact it, performance can increase drastically.

If all of us could love to see the people on our team be able to perform better but also enjoy that, talk more positively about our businesses, that alone is an incredible reason to really think about how do I have a strategic plan and avoid that stall? Being in a company that stalled is also very negative for morale. Even if you feel okay with that long-term, it's definitely a morale buster for your employees.

Let's talk about what a strategic plan can look like. How do you implement this? Well, we're going to talk more about the phases of this in the next episode because we can go into some nuanced details and actually talk about some of the techniques and the tactics that we deploy.

But overarching what you need to know is that when you start, if you haven't been doing this, you need to plan on putting some time and energy into creating your initial strategic plan. There's probably going to be more research that needs to be done upfront. Whereas if once you're keeping this going, and you're doing it on a quarterly or an annual basis, it won't be quite as much work.

But first one, you're really going to have to capture a lot of information and there's going to be a lot of information to sift through. You're really going to have to implement some filters to figure out what are the priority points, the things that if we focus in time, energy, and resources on, we can get the most ROI for where we're at right now.

The great thing about this process, and it's a three-step process that involves investigation, identification, and then implementation, is you can use the simple three-step process every single time in your business. It gets easier and easier every single time. Some of that data is stuff that you can just build on and really just update as you're going along.

Also, each time you do it, you build processes and systems and everything gets easier. By design, the system also involves your team. It's designed to incorporate your team members to educate them about the strategy, to give them ownership of the pieces that they can really impact and drive success with.

We'll talk more about that investigation, identification, and implementation in the next episode. Make sure you stick around for that. A couple more things to talk about in terms of the value of strategic plans. Beyond some of the stats that we know, there are some other things that people really come back to us and say, “This is what I see in my business now that I've implemented this.”

First off, it creates a lot of more comfort when you have really critical partners. It can be your bank, it can be your equipment manufacturers, it can be suppliers that you're working deals with, all of those things, if they see that you have a strategic plan and you're letting them on the pieces that are relevant to them, it gives them a lot of confidence in your performance and that you're going to be around a lot longer, which in our industry, that is so critical. For a lot of other industries, that's not nearly as relevant, but it's incredibly relevant that we have strong partnership relationships in our industry.

Also, if you want to build a business that's going to be a legacy business, meaning you're going to pass it on to descendants or you're building it up to sell it, it's really important, they want to see that you have a strategic plan. You're giving your predecessor a gift of a strategic plan by making them an ongoing process and incorporating that into what you do on a regular basis.

Then another one is brand awareness. Really creating brand awareness comes from understanding your market. When we’re doing the research, one of the key things we're looking at is how are we perceived in the hearts and the minds of our customers, our partners, our competition even, and we really want to have a strong brand awareness. We want our business to come to mind very easily.

Also, one of the things that we look for is competitive differentiation. Where can we really set ourselves apart in the unique where nobody else can touch us? Those are things that come up in strategic plans that are often a priority of those plans. It also increases credibility. It elevates the perceived value of our products and services and even the intangible things that come along with our products and services.

One of the models that we're going to talk about during the investigation phase, one of my favorite ones, the clock model, we'll talk about it more in the next episode is really, really effective at helping us figure out how we can increase our perceived value to our customers and partners, and even our employees in multiple different stages of that relationship, always, always increasing that value so those people actually become advocates for our brand.

Another thing that it does is it improves marketing and sales, it helps them perform better together. A lot of us have sales departments that actually operate in a silo. We have marketing departments that operate in silos and not even saying the same things. They don't even have the same goals or objectives.

I have a lot of companies that even come to me that say, “We have a really strong sales department. We're not sure how to make our marketing department even work for that. How do we integrate it? What tools do we deploy? Should we use this that we see this company doing or this over there?” It really depends so much on the research and the strategy that you're developing. But if you can get marketing and sales to work together, it's incredible the ROI that companies see.

Another thing that I think I like to see is the reproved recruitment and retention. A lot of companies think about their marketing, their strategy, or how they want to create brand awareness and that's the most valuable way for them to invest in that and put resources into it is to target it towards recruiting and retention.

A lot of our clients who actually have a significant part of their strategy outward facing is actually towards recruitment and development. That's a big part of their brand and what they're trying to build.

Another thing, which alludes to getting everybody on the team involved, is it can create operational clarity and performance. Even on your operation side, if they know what the strategy of the company is, they know that we want to do more this product and this product, they know why we approach problems on a project with a certain type of mindset because that's part of the brand we're creating and part of the perceived value we're trying to create, if they know that, it makes that happen quicker, better, and more efficiently in your business. Really creating operational clarity and performance.

Another thing that I love seeing the benefit of is crisis management. If you have a strategy in place, one of the models that we actually use, and we can pull it out really quickly if crisis happens, an accident on a job site, failure of a major piece of equipment, COVID was an incredible example, is we can actually pull a model out called the crisis management model.

We can actually implement everything we already developed in strategy and quickly come up with a sprint design, modified like a sub-strategy to apply to that situation. That's been a really incredible thing that we always hope we don't have to pull out for a client. But it's another really great benefit of already having that in place. You can quickly handle a situation when it arises.

If you want to learn more about where your company's at right now, we actually have an assessment tool that you can go, it's not going to obviously do all the deep research but it asks you some questions and it gives you a first indicator as to where you probably are going to be focusing and identifying that really first target point.

We find that it's over 90% accurate once we do strategy work to give you, at least a high-level overview of what department of your business do you probably need to be focusing on that might be causing that stall for you. If you go to storybuilt.marketing/assessment, you can take that quick assessment, and get yourself a really quick and just a few minutes a first idea of where you might be seeing something that's really leading you towards a stall in your business that you need to be watching out for.

Check that out, make sure that you are subscribed so that you get the next episode where we're going to dive into the actual process that you use for the initial strategy work, but also every single time you're doing that maintenance strategy piece and keeping that dated and also inviting your team to be engaged.

We're going to actually talk about some models we use and get into the nitty gritty on that so you're not going to want to miss that episode. Thanks again for checking out The Contractor's Daughter. We always love having you here. Make sure you're subscribed and leave a review. We would love to hear what you think. Of course, we know it's going to be a five-star review. We can't wait to see you at the conferences this season.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.