
Why Five Years?
Most strategic planning systems including Traction (The Entrepreneurs Operating System/EOS), StratOp (Patterson Center), and Gazelles (Verne Harnish, One Page Plan) start with a large vision for your business. They all include creating a large multi-year goal for your business. Your vision can be monetary gain, but ultimately a vision shows your team where the company is heading. Employees often help craft this vision. Allowing them to do so helps you grow your managed services business with the buy-in of the people you will rely on to help you achieve success. Is “making the CEO another 500K for his retirement fund” a vision that will resonate with employees or a plan they will be inspired to help you achieve? Probably not. A five-year plan should show your employees how working with you will help them achieve their own versions of success. Sharing your plan will help you attract the employees and clients that will be the best fits for your business – they share your vision!Five-year plans provide the framework for your success, but need to be broken down into smaller, more manageable annual targets and revisited regularly to ensure they are realistic and achievable based on changing market conditions. For example, many companies had to adapt their plans when Covid-19 forced business closures. It wasn’t a condition that companies anticipated, so it wasn’t considered in the crafting of their strategic plans. The market can change quickly; your five-year plan should include SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) contingency planning, scenarios like:- What happens if a large competitor comes in to the market offering lower rates?
- Are you at risk for weather-related disaster that limits your ability to support your customers or creates a need for each of your customers to require your services at the same time?
- Are you going to make a large investment in marketing? Invest in a strategic partnership with a new vendor?