Successful strategies are competitive game plans – approaches that delineate a series of objectives, identify areas where an enterprise will contend or endeavor, and recognize exclusive advantages that allow for success.

All the more profitable are strategies that fulfill your customers’ needs, coincide with your company’s potential and – most significant – go beyond what your competitors present.  We describe these enhanced tactics as One Percent Strategies™.

Our one- to two-day facilitation method is not typical.  We focus on strategic thinking.  We concentrate on facilitating elevated, wide-ranging conversations needed to formulate, launch, and carry out your company’s strategies for the next three, five, ten, and even 25 years.  We help you create a mutual Board and Management vision for what your company will be and establish how the Board and Management will set about in accomplishing the essentials of your strategic statements.  We want you – the leaders of your company – to dream, design, and determine what lies ahead. 

Our typical strategic thinking sessions encompass:

• Being free from the precision of relative certainty.  With near-perfect accuracy, we can plan and predict what will happen next week, month, and year.  But, planning for what we are certain of is not strategy – it is management.  Strategic thinking compels you to stake a claim on the customer, market, and industry spaces you believe your company can occupy in the future (typically, three to five years out).  Once you distinguish what is, mutually, possible and probable, your advantage in achieving your soon-to-come strategic objectives and statements is unmistakable.

• The hierarchy of your corporate statements.  Organizational guidance comes in several appearances.  From the grounds on which your company exists (mission) to the standards your company embraces (values) to precisely what you want your company to be (vision), we help you intensify the assertions that will inspire your strategies.  

• The Board’s and Management’s articulation of your vision.  When embarking on a strategic thinking expedition, it is to your advantage for each participant to verbalize – in a word or phrase – his or her vision of what the company can be.  Reliably, these matchless statements – created and agreed upon by all – generate a new level of strategic wisdom and viewpoints that support your corporate statements with more comprehensive direction.

• Considering your past to make way for your future.  Strategic thinking involves getting the picture of the past as a way to prepare an image for the future.  A broad dialogue considering your past strategic plans, tactics, scorecards, hits, misses, and still-in-progress ventures is significant since it helps to further shape your forward strategies and the probable necessary resources.

• A well-timed breakdown of your industry’s setting.  In complete perspective, we evaluate and discuss the most up-to-date issues involving your company, market, and industry.  With a wide-lens focus on products, services, demand, convenience, technology, demographics, economics, laws, regulations, competitors, and business models – we seek to recognize the compelling concerns, realize their effect on your company, and create budding strategies to concentrate on the likely prospects.

• Establishing strategic statements.  The decisive set of objectives that will steer the operations of your company over the next several years must, at all times, be unambiguous.  This precision has an insightful influence.  Your strategic statements shift from being wide-ranging, i.e. “We will build more locations” to extremely exact, i.e. “We will build smaller stores with kiosk and drive-through service in high-traffic locations.”

• Refining your One Percent Strategies™.  The most significant features of your strategy statements are the sustainable, competitive advantages that you possess – past the extent of your competitors’ offerings.  These advantages – your One Percent Strategies™ – are drawn from a systematic debate and breakdown of means that allow your company to differentiate itself, all within the boundaries of your customers’ needs and your internal capabilities.  Identifying these distinctions plays a role in the successful execution of each strategy. 

• Tasking Management with developing plans, tactics, and scorecard fundamentals.  Strategic planning – the outline and explanation of strategic thinking – is best carried out by Management.  These executives, at a range of professional levels, are intensely involved with the specific, strategic issues in sight.  Their insight, experience, access to data, and original research allows them to fuse your mission, values, vision, and strategies into attainable plans, goals, and results that the Board approves and oversees as Management implements.