What's your Business Strategy?

What is a Business Strategy?

Business Strategy lays down the policies and plans for achieving the objectives of the organization. The objectives entails the mission, vision, and goals of the business, and the strategy is the masterplan of how you are going to achieve these organizational objectives.

Why do you need a Business Strategy?

Just like you do financial planning for your clients, you devise a plan for them to achieve their long term and short term goals, keeping in mind their needs, perspectives, their risk profile, etc. The financial plan serves as a guide to the investor through his investing journey, since it gives a broad view of the trajectory towards his long term goals, and he can understand the impact of various investing decisions on his goal achievement.

What financial planning does for an investor, business strategy planning does for the advisor. Your business strategy is the master plan for your business, it is a step by step action plan for achieving your business objectives. Having a well defined business strategy not just gives you a sense of direction, but it will give clarity of approach to your employees too.

So, the first step, Define your vision and your long term goals. Once you have visualized where you want to see your business 10 years down the line or even further, break down your long term vision into short term targets.

Next Define the strategy which is going to maneuver your business all the way to reach your goals, actualize your vision, while overcoming the challenges that come in between.

Following are the key ingredients of a business strategy.

• Identify the client segment/s you intend to target and how are you going to approach your prospective clients. You can cater to the entire universe of investors also, but targeting a specific lot on the basis of your strengths, interests, like-mindedness; will enable you streamline your business processes and concentrate your efforts in one direction. It may be difficult in the initial stages when the client base is small, but as the business grows, and you have established yourself in the niche, then it becomes relatively simple and more rewarding, since you understand the target segment deep down, people trust your knowledge, and chances of getting referrals also increase.
• How do you want to position your business and build your brand? For a product provider, his brand is imprinted on his product package, it's all around on his advertising campaigns, websites, everywhere. But for a service provider, brand building brings in additional challenges, because he is not offering a tangible product which shows off his brand. So, what impression do you want to create in the client's mind? How are you going to differentiate yourselves from other advisors? How do you want your clients to tell your story? This is your brand strategy, which must be clearly defined and communicated, because this is what each person of your organization will reflect in his eyes, in his words, in his expressions and his gait.
• Identify your take on business expansion. How will you get more leads and referrals, to get more clients on board? Identify the techniques you will use for business development activities, define the broad lines for marketing activities.
• Next, define your client retention strategy, what service practices will you adopt to ensure client satisfaction. Define a mantra for client servicing and satisfaction, this is something which you and your employees are going to look upon and practice everyday.

The above were the key elements that go into making up of a business strategy. However, Business strategy like your client's financial plan is not a one time thing, your goals evolve, specializations may change, your methods may change, so there is a need to constantly adjust your business strategy to the developments. Hence just like you review your clients' financial plans from time to time, you need to regularly look back at your own business strategy. Business strategy gives a direction to business, it is a vast concept, this was just an overview to give you a broad sense of how you can go about developing yours.

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