To understand strategic planning we first need to understand what business strategy is. Good business strategy is a well thought through, set of coherent (focused and coordinated) choices that lead to coherent action that drives the success of the business. Strategic planning is therefore the process of developing this set of choices and initiatives that will achieve your business success goals.

If you are in business, you are making business choices and therefore you are doing strategy. There are two extremes to doing strategy:

• Haphazard strategy: When you are making the choices "on the fly" in a reactive, haphazard manner. You are not applying a strategic planning process.

• Fixed plan strategy: When you have a formal, thought through plan but your plan is fixed, does not adapt and you do not align the management of your business with your plan.

Both approaches are not ideal. You want an effective strategy that adapts to change and that you align the management of the business with. A lack of strategic planning is a key contributor to business failure and the inability to achieve sustained success.

The strategic planning enabled through ChoiceWyze is an adaptive approach that guides you through the documentation of your key choices and actions/initiatives and provides the ability to adapt your strategy to change.

Strategic planning is undertaken through the process of business model optimisation. Your business model is a representation of how the business creates and delivers value to customers and captures value for the business. Through our ChoiceWyze workflow you firstly map your buisness to the business model, you then evaluate your business in terms of the business model and then you determine your key choices and initiatives that will drive your business success. This is an iterative process where you map, evaluate and determnine choices and initiatives that moves the business forward on its success path.

Every entrepreneur wants to avoid failure and have a successful and thriving business. But many fail. And many struggle to succed.

Research into small, medium enterprises (SME's) in South Africa show that small businesses have both a failure and a growth problem. As many as 80% of businesses fail within the first three years. Research shows that only 1% of busineses that start with less than 5 employees grow to more that 10 employees.

There are a number of contributors to these dynamics, including:

• Lack of funding

• Poor product-market fit

• Government red tape

• Lack of access to market

An inability to undertake effective strategic planning is a dominant cause of business failure and poor performance.

By undertaking effective strategic planning you focus on the things that matter most and will have the most positive impact on the business. Therefore, undertaking effective strategic planning increases the likelihood of sustained business success.

Your business strategy must guide and inform your decision making and how the business is run.

Once you have developed your business strategy you should align it to the business through the following:

• Use it as input into the development of operational plans

• The business strategy informs your key performance indicators and their associated targets

• Regularly assess how the business is performing on its key choices

• Include discussions on the business strategy as part of management meetings

• Focus energy and effort on undertaking those initiatives that enable your strategic choices

• Undertake regular strategic reviews

• Proactively adapt the business strategy to reflect new opportunities, changes in the business and its environemnt

You create your business model by first mapping the business in terms of the business model framework, then evaluating the business and then determining the choices and initiatives that will achieve the winning aspirations or success goals.

You go through a process of adapting your busines model once you have completed the first business model.

The amount of time required to complete the first iteration of the business model is dependant on the size and complexity of the business as well as how comprehensive the user is in capturing business information. In most instances each of mapping, evaluation and choices should take at least 1 hour. Once the first iteration is complete the duration of further iterations will be dependant on what is updated and could take as little as a few minutes to update.

Your business strategy should not be a fixed, unchanging plan. You have probably heard the saying "The only constant is change". Your business will change and the environment within which your business operates will change. New opportunities will present themselves as well as new threats. Your strategy should therefore adapt to these changing circumstances. If your strategy does not adapt, then the business is less effective and less likely to achieve sustained success.

• Use ChoiceWyze to develop your business strategy and structure your bsuiness model

• Use ChoiceWyze to review your business strategy

• Use ChoiceWyze to adapt your business strategy

• Use ChoiceWyze to communicate your strategy to stakeholders (e.g. business partners, employees, funders)

• Use ChoiceWyze to inform how you run your business

• Use ChoiceWyze to focus projects on those initiatives that will enable your strategic choices

• Use ChoiceWyze during management meetings

• Use ChoiceWyze to familiarise yourself with your strategy

• Use ChoiceWyze to refresh your memory of the strategy

ChoiceWyze is a web application and therefore available to you 24 hours a day. We recommend using ChoiceWyze as much as possible. We recommend that you use ChoiceWyze at least once a week.

The act of strategising and planning is important but rarely urgent. More urgent matters (but not necessarily more important) can always arise that you feel you need to deal with and delay doing the strategic planning. What then happens is that strategic planning is delayed on an ongoing basis and you never get to it.

To prevent this from happening we recommend that you block out time in your diary (paper or electronic diary) to devout to strategic planning. This blocked out time is not used for other more urgen t matters. You can also identify, up front, the more important matters that will be exceptions that could result in you using the time block for another task.

Yes. The building blocks of the ChoiceWyze business model framework covers the key aspects of the business. The inputs into mapping, evaluation and choices can be directly incorporated into the "story" of the business plan.

ChoiceWyze has been developed to empower you to develop your business strategy without the need for a business consultant.

Business consultants provide additional value in terms of their ability to co-create the strategy with you. You can therefore work with a business consultant to undertake the ChoiceWyze business model optimisation process with you. The consultant can facilitate the process of using Choicewyze.

ChoiceWyze enables you to share your business model with other subscribers. This allows other subscribers to access, view and interact with your business model. It is useful to collaborate with other team members or other relevant stakeholders on your business model.

Click on the "Share this model" button at the top of the page in the application. You will be prompted to add the email address of the person you want to invite to share the business model. An email with a link will be sent to the invitee. The invitee will be able to access your business model by clicking on the link. Only registered subscribers will be able to access the business model.