How best-in-class firms use strategic planning and Service Leadership tools to support their value creation strategy

This is a quarterly newsletter courtesy of Service Leadership Inc.®, a ConnectWise company.

Many businesses reach a point in their existence when there is a realization that stagnation as a result of missed growth goals requires completely overhauling how business planning and operations have been approached. A common and effective solution is adopting a strategic planning system to help: 

• Define a new strategy,
• Turn the strategy into actionable priorities, and
• Segment the priorities into quarterly and weekly commitments.
• Measure progress, re-orient as needed in iterative cycles

These systems are designed to ensure strategy isn’t just discussed, but is executed. While going through this process, it is invaluable to have good data, relevant guidance, and tools available that help ensure each step in the process is as successful as possible. Service Leadership offerings such as the Service Leadership Index® benchmarking, Solution Provider Value Creation Planner, and SLIQ™ tools offer unparalleled insight into objectively measuring performance, operational maturity, as well as professional guidance on the improvements that will make the biggest impact on your business. But these tools in and of themselves are not strategic planning frameworks;, they are designed to be complementary. Together with a strategic planning system framework, the Service Leadership toolset forms a powerful combination that fuels the performance of best-in-class IT solution providers through faster, more profitable business growth and, most importantly, value creation.

We’ll outlines how the Service Leadership toolset canshould be used alongside a strategic planning system. By aligning a strategic planning system with Service Leadership’s tools, organizations can maximize the value of both.

Strategic planning system components

Strategic planning methodologies have been around for decades and generally share a high-level model. There are many examples of strategic planning systems, such as Gazelles (now rebranded as Scaling Up), StratOp®, and, currently, the most popular one used by MSPs is the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS). The proliferation of business consultants in the industry utilizing these systems in their coaching and consulting practices is a strong illustration of how beneficial strategic planning systems have been for providing structure and accountability to business owners and executives.

Although the landscape of strategic planning systems is wide and varied, there is a rough outline that informs the elements of each and serves as a helpful model for broadly illustrating how they come together to form the whole. We have identified eight elements that underlie just about every strategic planning system, and within each of these elements are key activities that are found in some form across the various models.