Strategic Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 16. Planning Considerations for Entrepreneurs and Department Managers

In This Chapter

• Establishing an exit strategy for business owners

• Discovering how to cascade goals throughout an organization

• Watching out for departmental planning pitfalls

One size doesn't fit all when it comes to strategic planning. You can easily pick and choose the pieces of strategic planning that apply to your company (as presented in the previous chapters). However, there are a few cases that deserve special attention: entrepreneurs and department/division/group managers.

Business owners have the unique responsibility of determining the strategic direction of an organization based on their personal endgame — the final result they want out of their business. An endgame can be anything from continual cash flow, to a business sale, to more time off. Whatever it is, the endgame is the personal vision of the business owner (see Chapter 6). Multi‐department or multi‐tiered organizations must drive the strategic direction down to every level of the company. This process is easy when there are only a handful of employees. But when you have many departments or divisions or numerous locations, planning becomes more complicated.

This chapter is intended to be an addendum to rest of the book. Although everything presented in the previous chapters is completely applicable, this chapter takes planning one step future for entrepreneurs and department mangers.

In this chapter, you determine the value of your company ...