"Building Your Roadmap: Why Every SME Needs a Strategy – The Pembroke Way"
What Is a Strategy?
A strategy is a comprehensive set of principles and choices that guide an organisation in achieving its long-term goals and objectives. It acts as a roadmap, helping a business determine where it wants to go and how it will get there, especially amidst competition and changing markets. For SMEs, a strategy defines the vision, mission, target market, competitive advantage, and the allocation of resources to achieve desired outcomes.
Why Does an SME Need a Strategy?
SMEs need a strategy for several crucial reasons:
Clarity and Direction: A strategy provides a clear vision and mission, ensuring everyone in the organisation understands the business’s purpose and direction.
Informed Decision-Making: With a defined strategy, SMEs can make better, data-driven decisions that align with their long-term objectives, rather than reacting impulsively to daily challenges.
Efficient Resource Allocation: Resources are often limited in SMEs. A strategy helps prioritise actions and investments that offer the greatest return, reducing waste and maximising impact.
Competitive Advantage: A well-crafted strategy identifies what sets the business apart from competitors, enabling SMEs to capitalise on their strengths and market opportunities.
Risk Management: Strategic planning helps SMEs anticipate and prepare for risks, improving resilience in volatile markets.
Sustainable Growth: By setting clear goals and tracking progress, a strategy supports systematic growth and long-term success.
Adaptability and Innovation: A strategic approach encourages ongoing assessment and adaptation, allowing SMEs to innovate and respond to market changes.
The Process to Develop a Strategy
Developing a strategy for an SME typically involves the following steps:
1. Define Vision and Mission
Establish what your business stands for (mission) and what it aspires to achieve in the long term (vision).
2. Analyse Your Business Environment
Conduct internal analysis (e.g., SWOT-Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).
Assess external factors (e.g., market trends, competition, regulations) using frameworks like PESTEL.
3. Set Strategic Goals and Objectives
Develop clear, measurable goals (using the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) that support your vision and mission.
4. Develop Competitive Strategy
Decide on your approach: cost leadership, differentiation, or niche focus, based on your unique strengths and market position
5. Create an Actionable Plan
Outline strategic initiatives, assign responsibilities, set timelines, and define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress
6. Execute and Monitor
Implement the plan, monitor outcomes, and adjust as needed to stay aligned with your strategy and respond to changes in the environment.
7. Review and Update Regularly
Revisit your strategy at least annually or when significant changes occur, ensuring ongoing relevance and effectiveness
At Pembroke we believe that the starting point to developing a Strategy is to understand you medium and long term goals for your business. This could be a combination of growth ambitions and the ultimate destination for your business, perhaps you want to pass it to the next generation or secure a trade sale.
Whatever the goals are, our starting place is to take you through a facilitated Discovery Day where we utilise our bespoke benchmarking and assessment tools to identify where your business currently is under key business pillars such as Finance, Sales & Marketing, People & Management, Digitalisation, Sustainability and others. We supplement this with understanding your company history, its values and its vision and facilitating a SWOT analysis on the business.
Combining all of the above we identify the emerging strategic opportunities within your business and we then explore these in more depth by spending time within the business and interacting with your team to further develop these initiatives under key business pillars.
The output is a clearly defined set of challenges, recommendations and ultimately a strategy for your business that sets out key milestones and measures in the form of Key Performance Indicators (LPI’s) to realise your stated goals.
We then utilise our experience and expertise to help you to implement the strategy in your business driving growth and managing change.