In this episode of The Business Owner’s Journey, host Nick Berry delves into the Strategic Alignment Plan, a crucial framework for small business owners looking to streamline their vision, goals, and decision-making processes. Learn how this simple yet powerful tool can help you align your core values, set smart goals, and ensure your business stays on track.
Nick Berry emphasizes the value of having a Strategic Alignment Plan (SAP) for small business owners. He explains how this two-page framework helps capture both strategic and operational goals, bringing them into one cohesive place. This ensures that every team member is aligned and aware of the business’s direction, ultimately creating a common operating system that fosters coherence and alignment.
Core values are fundamental to the success and culture of a business. Nick advises that three to seven core values should guide behavior, hiring, and training. These values should be shared regularly with the team to keep them at the forefront of everyone's mind, reinforcing decision-making and gaining team buy-in.
Nick highlights the significance of having a clear long-term vision. This vision acts as the North Star, guiding decision-making and strategic planning. He recommends setting a vision that spans three or more years into the future and revisiting it annually to ensure it remains relevant and inspiring.
Understanding your core offer and ideal client profile is crucial. Nick walks through how to identify the product or service around which the business is built, ensuring it meets the ideal client's needs and is profitable. He also details the importance of demographic and psychographic information in profiling the ideal client, focusing on characteristics that truly define them.
Nick advocates for the SMART(R) goal framework—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely, and Results-oriented. He explains how to set one-year goals that align with the long-term vision and break them down into quarterly rocks to keep the team focused and on track.
Then check out the How to Use the Strategic Alignment Plan Guide Here.
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Nick (00:00)
I'm gonna do a quick walkthrough of my strategic alignment plan.
Nick (00:05)
I'm going to walk you through this as if you have the worksheet printed out or in front of you on your screen. If you do not, if you need to get a copy of it, you need to go to nickberry .info slash SAP. SAP as in strategic alignment plan. Get your copy there. Okay.
Nick (00:26)
I'm sharing this because this is the single most impactful, most used, most important resource that I've ever implemented in any of my businesses. And it's super simple, which is part of the reason why it's so impactful, it's just a two page framework to help
business owners capture your strategy and your operational goals and bring them into one place. It's super lean. It's important because for the business owners that forces you to pull your strategy, the elements of your strategy together into a single hub or home base rather than doing as we would do otherwise and leaving it scattered, which results in it being discombobulated. Having it all pulled into one place.
It gives everybody who's involved, who needs to be aware of it, a common operating system. And that starts to create alignment. It ensures coherence in your strategy, which is extremely important. And it helps you identify blind spots easier. You've got everything that the material information is that they're in one place. not to be lost is strategic planning is something that should be a process that occurs on regular basis and having a single home base.
for the output of the strategic planning, a place for you to go and reference in between the strategic planning meetings is extremely important. It helps you keep momentum behind that process and make sure that your strategy is not something that you come out of the planning process with and go put it on the shelf and let it start to collect dust. It keeps it living and breathing in your business.
Nick (02:07)
I'm gonna start with the cover sheet where you'll see that it says,
business alignment system, strategic alignment plan, and then it's got three steps. Know the vision, know your priorities, and get the job done. And that's the key to all of this, That is, that's how you create alignment. That's how you chunk goals down, whatever the goals may be, into like productive activities. You know the vision, so that's your, the North Star. Your long -term vision, the culture, and then knowing what to focus on means like what's important right
And getting it done means exactly that, get it done. That's being accountable for the results that are expected to be produced from the activities and showing up with a done or a not done result, not showing up simply with a, here's what I got done. And there's a very big difference in those two things. Okay, moving on to first page,
so this is where you're to begin to document your strategy. Your strategic alignment plan is going to help you articulate where you're going, how you're going to get there, who you're going to be working with, what are you going to do for them, and overall, how are you going to go and compete and win.
So let's start with core values. Everybody's probably somewhat familiar at least with core values and culture in their business. I'll give it a quick walkthrough. This is how we're going to do things here. This is how you define how you're going to do things here. Your core values are the values that you should find them in yourself as a business leader and also in the type of people that you want to have in your business. They're the values that are going
ultimately define your culture. They should guide behaviors as well as activities like hiring, firing, onboarding, training.
Three to seven should be enough to cover the essentials of how you do things here, but without having so many that they become diluted or it's too many to be able to recall.
Core values should be shared with the team and ideally visible regularly. So that's going to help keep the whole concept in the back of everybody's mind, which should help reinforce the decision making, create opportunities for them to give input. And it's going to help get buy -in from everyone on what the values and the culture is going to become.
Nick (04:29)
Next section is your long -term vision. This is your North Star. And this is where you're to get a snapshot of the picture of what you want your business to look like in the future. And I suggest three or more years in the future, but whatever the vision is that you have, create a picture in enough detail and clarity that you can then use that to reverse engineer to create
action, an action plan to execute. And this is going to be your, your beacon. to follow, to set your direction and then also continually do your course corrections. It needs to be an aspiring picture for you and your team. It's a compass for, for the decision making and even though the route might change of how you're going to get there over time.
the destination is going to stay the same. The North Star is going to stay the same. You need to surface and share your, whatever the picture of your long -term vision is with your staff, the people that you need buy -in from regularly. in the back of everyone's mind, similar to the core values. That's going to help guide their decision -making, create opportunities for input, get buy -in.
You're also going to use this to set your short -term goals and make sure that anytime you're setting short -term goals, you're always taking a moment to hold that up against your long -term vision and ask, is this whatever we're doing now, is this helping move us toward reaching the goals that we've set for long -term, this long -term vision? Then you need to regularly reassess the long -term vision.
suggest yearly. I'm not sure that doing it any more frequently than that is necessary or even effective, but you need to spend some time as a leader, as the person responsible for it, reflecting and refreshing on what your perspective is on the long -term vision regularly.
Nick (06:19)
Next, you're gonna outline your core offer. This is either the product or the service, whatever you're building your business around. And it needs to meet a few criteria. It needs to match the ideal client's needs. There needs to be a sufficient market. This product or service needs to be a sufficient driver of revenue and you need to be good at delivering it.
so basically you need to be able to answer the questions. Does it solve a problem? If so, what problem? For whom? Are there enough of them out there? Are they willing to pay us enough? And can we deliver that profitably to be able to build a sufficient business around this?
Nick (07:02)
Okay, for positioning statement, differentiation, ideal client profiles, we're getting into the marketing strategy a little bit deeper. So we're gonna capture some components of that. Remember that the idea behind this worksheet is to bring all of this information into one place. It's not necessarily where you're going to do your deep dive work in fleshing out some of these things. So for your ideal client profiles, we may not be capturing the entire.
ideal client profile on this page, So that's okay. What we want to do is bring the key elements of the ideal client profiles here into this centralized place. So the ideal clients, it's gonna, profiles, whether you have one or you have five, it doesn't make any difference. You're gonna, they're, the profiles themselves are gonna have the geographic, psychographic, demographic.
information. What I emphasize and I think is most important is that you're very clear on the elements that separate them that actually make them the ideal client. Okay. So don't get lost in some of the secondary details that while they might help with humanizing the profiles and, are important for certain parts of the marketing or sales.
functions, they aren't necessarily what makes someone the ideal client. for example, my audience is business owners who are looking to level up their leadership, their strategy as entrepreneurs. And so, and they're looking for mentorship and guidance in order to do
So the characteristic that I'm looking for is that people who like don't want to have to learn everything the hard way, right? So that is a key element or descriptor of the ideal client that I would include here. What does not make all that much difference is that they're 44 years old and drive a Chevy Tahoe. So that's demographic information that's
not material for this worksheet, for this document right now. So your ideal client profiles go there, then also your positioning and differentiation. Your positioning is where you're articulating, why should a customer choose your business over someone else's? So you want to capture your business unique strengths. This is what's going to be
like the central elements of your marketing and sales efforts.
And then at the bottom of the first page, we've got one year goals. And that's where we start to kind of bring this, all of this in the strategy into a more of a focal point to build out the operational plan. So one year goals, pretty simple. Just want to capture, can either be like performance goals or other objectives, What are the things that need to be accomplished at the end of this year?
in order to be on track for reaching that long -term vision in the dedicated timeline. And I'm a big fan of smart goals. And actually, I'd like to add an extra R to the end and do smarter goals. So specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely, and then the extra R would be results oriented. I want to make sure that we account for like, what's the outcome that's expected to be produced.
So use a smart or smarter goal framework to establish your one -year goals and you can put those at the bottom of the first page. then moving into the second page of the strategic alignment plan is where we start to capture the shorter term, more of the operational plan. And it's broken up into just a few simple sections. At the top, we've got our quarterly rocks. So we're going to use a quarterly
strategic planning cycle. So we establish what our quarterly rocks are and then our scorecard goals. So our rocks would be for objectives. Our scorecard goals would be for performance goals. And each one needs to be structured in a way so we know like what's the outcome that's to be achieved, who owns it,
what's the deadline, and then we can also use this worksheet to report in regularly whether we're on track or off track for hitting that goal by that deadline. So that's the quarterly rocks and the scorecard goals metric section. And then below that, there's an issues and opportunities list where it's just a holding area to document any of
that can be problems or that can be opportunities, things that we want to address at the next quarterly planning conversation. So we can keep track of loose end items without them having to take up space on someone's priority list.
And that's the SAP. Again, it's a hugely productive tool. It's one that I insist on implementing in any of the businesses that I'm involved with because it pulls all of the material, the high level information together in one place so we can all sing from the same songbook. We can all pull from the same source information.
instructions or our guidance system, if you will, is all the same. And we use that rather than having to come back to the table and do these rebuild conversations, getting everyone on the same page as to who we are, what we're about, where are we going, how are we going to get there. You've always got this document that is a living, breathing document that we're going to just build upon over time rather
We create one, we lose track of it, we come back, we try again. so it's rather, there's, it's contiguous rather than being a transactional process.
Nick Berry is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO, whose track record includes founding and leading numerous companies since 2002.
He is also a mentor and coach to other entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for a trusted (and proven) advisor.
Among peers, colleagues, staff, and clients, Nick has been referred to as both 'The Business Guy' as well as 'The Anti-Guru', due to his pragmatic approach and principled leadership.
He shares his insights and lessons learned, along with those of his expert guests,
on his podcast, 'The Business Owner's Journey'.
