How to Use Strategic Initiatives to Turbocharge Your Business

Strategic initiatives are the secret sauces that fuel the growth and development of companies. While setting goals is easy, very few businesses lay out plans on how they can achieve them. That plan, which sets out how the company would achieve its strategic goals, is called a strategic initiative.

To consistently stay ahead of competitors, increase customer base, and meet business needs, business owners must build a strategic initiative and follow through.

This article explores the concept of strategic initiatives, their advantages, and some examples of successful initiatives that your brand can undertake.

What Are Strategic Initiatives

Strategic initiatives are action-oriented and measurable activities required to achieve the company’s goals and objectives. If goals serve as the destination for a company, strategic initiatives are the maps to complete that journey. Strategic initiatives are the major activities a company undertakes to reach its objectives.

They are guided by the company’s strategy plan — which clearly defines the overall direction and priorities of the business. These proactive steps involve strategic planning, efficient resource allocation, and razor-sharp execution by all team members.

Let’s say a local bakery aims to boost sales by 10%. To achieve this, they might utilize a series of strategic initiatives that helps them raise brand awareness and visibility within their region.

Furthermore, strategic initiatives can be deployed on multiple projects. You can craft multiple projects to achieve one initiative as a business owner. However, several things need to be implemented before crafting a strategic initiative.

First, you need to set a specific business goal you want to achieve. The goal will determine the strategies necessary to bring it to realization.

A Gartner study found that a lack of clear priorities (goals) represents 14% of problems that could hinder companies from achieving success in their industry.

Based on the data, 22% of the respondents reported difficulty communicating business objectives and goals, while 34% cited ambiguous responsibilities as a significant issue. This highlights the importance of establishing clear goals and a strong vision before implementing strategic initiatives.

After that, you have to create practical steps to achieve these goals. Business goals should be based on real-world situations, and the steps to reach your destination should reflect that.

Following that, you have to develop specific and clear milestones. These will be the checkpoints to assess your progress toward actualizing your goals. Finally, choose a strategy to implement, create a plan with a deadline, and share it with all stakeholders to ensure buy-in.

In summary, companies need strategic initiatives to chart their path to success. These initiatives help businesses to better translate their goals and visions into practice to maintain a competitive edge.

Benefits of Strategic Initiatives

Besides enabling systemic growth and helping businesses expand their market reach, strategic initiatives create even more benefits and opportunities companies can tap into. Below, we considered four of the most prominent merits businesses should be aware of;

Encourage Innovation: Strategic initiatives encourage innovation and teamwork within a company. Their unique nature promotes creative thinking, experimentation, collaboration, and the exploration of new ideas. By creating a space where innovation is supported and celebrated, businesses can stay competitive, adapt to changing market conditions, and achieve long-term success.

Enhance Competitiveness: Businesses that engage in strategic initiatives have a competitive edge. Companies can create a set of initiatives to increase their market share and command more market sales. Businesses can also use strategic initiatives to defend their existing market position by reaching realistic goals that improve their existing offers on products, benefits, and services.

Bridge Gaps Between a Business Target and Actual Performance: Strategic initiatives also help businesses to bridge the gap between their current and target performances. With laid-out, systemic plans, companies can better position themselves on the template they need that will inherently differ from their current performance.

Help in Systemic Progress: Growth and progress are two vital components businesses strive for. Strategic initiatives can provide the needed leverage to reach them. With the proper goal, strategic initiatives will help businesses to meet their milestones and generate the momentum to grow in their respective fields.

What Makes a Strategic Initiative Successful or Unsuccessful

Several factors can either enhance or hinder a strategic initiative within an organization. These factors include:

Having a Well-Defined Scope: Scope is a key part of the project planning process. It details the total work and time required to complete a project. Very few factors can determine the success of a strategic initiative as much as having a well-defined scope. For businesses, this is non-negotiable. You must be able to meticulously define the scope, which includes all of the resources needed and milestones for each step, including start and end dates. These details are extremely important. They better allow the business to zoom in on the most important things and discard irrelevancies in their drive to meet their strategic goals.

Revolutionary Nature: For a strategic initiative to be successful, it has to change how the company operates and cause it to evolve. The deal here is to ensure that novel activities and operational steps can drive the business to where it needs to be and beyond. Besides this, a strategic initiative should also create change and alter the company’s thinking. For instance, growing your business revenue from $20,000 to $2,000,000 requires different thinking in how you source for clients and meet their needs. Revolutionizing your business mindset with strategic initiatives will help you better scale to the height you have envisioned.

Eliminates Performance Gaps: A great strategic initiative closes performance gaps in the business. Performance gaps are differences between ideal results and actual outcomes a company generates. These gaps can impact the overall health of your business. For instance, if your business sets out to achieve a revenue of $20 million but can only earn $10 million, there’s a performance gap of $10M. The integration of a strategic initiative in this business would address this gap.

According to a Tech Jury report, US businesses lose about $2.9 million daily in finding replacement workers for underperforming employees. Most of the issues lie in limited growth opportunities and poor welfare. A successful strategic initiative can better plug these performance holes by putting in place measures to upskill employees and improve their welfare.

Examples of Strategic Initiatives

Strategic initiatives come in different forms depending on the industry your business operates. Below, we showcase some popular strategic initiatives in the manufacturing, tech, and marketing fields:

Technology (Software) Strategic Initiatives

Technology strategic initiatives examples include:

• Build a next-generation financial microservice for influencers to increase their customer onboarding processes by 50%.
• Develop a more secure, decentralized cloud-native service with blockchain data encryption functionality.
• Build an AI chatbot that will increase user productivity by 50% by the fall of 2024.

Manufacturing Strategic Initiatives

Manufacturing strategic initiatives include:

• Increase market penetration by 15% in Asia by launching low-cost EVs by early 2025.
• Scale aluminum production by investing in more advanced production and assembling machines before FY 2023.
• Sign a battery-production agreement with Siemens to provide solid-state batteries (SSBs) to meet a 2024 target for Eastern Europe.

Marketing Strategic Initiatives

Marketing strategic initiatives include:

• Create 200 evergreen content pages to drive a 10% increase in traffic, backlinks, and sales by December 2023.
• Develop and produce 12 mini product samples in-house and from existing customers.
• Launch ten sturdy kiosk machines in key strategic locations in Estonia to generate further awareness.

Healthcare Strategic Initiatives

Healthcare strategic initiatives include:

• Develop and scale up 15 age-friendly systems across sister clinics in Manchester by 2025.
• Increase the number of MRI scans in all American hospitals by 15% to help doctors make proper diagnoses.
• Retire all ambulances over 15 years from active duty and replace them with appropriate, power-efficient, sustainable ZEVs.

How to Use Strategic Initiatives to Turbocharge Your Business

Using strategic initiatives can immensely boost businesses, stay ahead of the competition, and propel sales growth to great heights.

In this section, we’ve broken down how to implement these initiatives effectively into a step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define Business Visions and Goals

The first step to implementing strategic initiatives in businesses is clearly defining visions and objectives.
A well-defined vision becomes the core of all strategies and decisions geared toward business growth, regardless of size, popularity, or user base.

Without vision, businesses will lack a coherent strategy, eventually leading to a gap in achieving stated objectives and goals.

While vision precedes goals, it is important to set realistic objectives that align with the overall business plan in the short and long term.

Step 2: Conduct a Comprehensive SWOT Analysis

After identifying clear-cut visions and goals for businesses, the next step is to comprehensively analyze the businesses’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, otherwise known as SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis acts as a framework to understand the state of businesses. When an entrepreneur is aware of the strengths of a business, actions are launched to promote these strengths and even improve them to make them more versatile and appealing.

Similarly, SWOT analysis exposes the weakness of a business, which offers entrepreneurs insight into downtrends and possible ways to mitigate and potentially eliminate them.

Market opportunities and threats are also highlighted by SWOT, enabling individuals to know the opportunities a business can leverage to greater heights and threats that pose an adverse risk.

Overall, SWOT analysis enables individuals to understand their businesses better, identify areas needing improvement, decide if new products or services should be introduced, and understand market competitors.

Step 3: Prioritize Strategic Initiatives

Now that the business has set its vision and goals, a SWOT analysis has been conducted, and several strategic initiatives (listed above this section) are on the table. Should all be implemented, or only a few?

One prevalent mistake business owners and professionals can make when implementing strategic initiatives is taking on too much at once.

Of course, these initiatives are vital to businesses’ overall growth. However, it can be challenging to spread resources over too many options.

When finances, capital, labor, and time are stretched too thin across various strategic initiatives, it causes early burnouts, confusion, and poor results.

According to Bridges Business Consultancy, almost half of the businesses on a global scale fail to achieve set visions and goals due to implementing all strategic initiatives.

To avoid the same fate, business professionals should prioritize and maximize a few of these strategies that align with organizational goals in the short or the long term.

Once strategic initiatives are chosen, action plans for each should be developed to kickstart the mode of operation to aid business growth.

Step 4: Allocation of Resources

After selecting and developing action plans for strategic initiatives have been processed, the next important step is allocating resources like finances, time, and talent/workforce.

Similar to all steps, it is important for business professionals to carefully allocate these resources in an effective mode that prioritizes efficiency and a positive growth trajectory in a given period.

Individuals should consider reallocating resources from low-impact activities to high-potential strategic initiatives for better results.

Step 5: Monitor Progress

After the efficient allocation of resources, the operation of selected strategic initiatives is expected to be in motion.

Business professionals should maintain smooth communication with crucial team members to ensure success.

Additionally, the iteration of visions and objectives should be continuous, establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track the progress of each initiative in use.

Regularly reviewing performance metrics is important as it enables business owners to adjust as needed and adapt to the ever-evolving market conditions.

Step 6: Learn From Failures

Although strategic initiatives have the potential to drive overall business growth, it’s important to note that only some initiatives will fail, even if they were well-devised.

Several implementations might fail due to undefined visions and goals, lack of substantial resources, wrong interpretation of SWOT, and many more.

Nonetheless, business professionals should learn from their failures and setbacks, using them as a springboard for growth.

Are Strategic Initiatives Worth the Extra Effort for My Business?

Strategic initiatives are, beyond doubt, important to an organization’s vision, execution, and continual progress toward profit-centric goals.

According to the Journal of Small Business Management data statistics, 71% of fast-paced businesses have implemented strategic initiatives in motion geared towards long-range goals.

More so, a survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit indicated that up to 88% of management teams had highlighted the success of strategic initiatives and cited their core importance in their company’s overall growth.

While these statistics identify the importance of investing in strategic initiatives, it’s important to remember that they still need to be implemented skillfully.

According to the Harvard Business Review report, 95% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategy.

Bridges Business Consultancy also highlighted that 48% of all organizations fail to meet half of their strategic initiatives targets. It is evident from these data that strategic initiatives are vital to business growth.

However, crucial team members must understand these initiatives to be implemented or achieve set objectives.

Overall, strategic initiatives are worth the extra effort for a vast majority of businesses at the cost of a little time and effort for the executives. To ensure constant success, the definition of visions and goals, comprehensive understanding of team players, and allocation of resources must be done efficiently.

References

• Gartner
• Tech Jury
• Bridges Business Consultancy
• The Economist
• Harvard Business Review
• Bridges Business Consultancy
• Journal of Small Business Management