Southwest Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce members heard how their businesses’ strategic plan can achieve results on March 12 from Georgia State University’s Regents Professor of Marketing Emeritus Ken Bernhardt.
The Thought Leaders luncheon is a monthly event at the Hilton Atlanta Northeast hotel on the second Thursday of the month, inviting speakers like Bernhardt to share their expertise with the community.
The Southwest Gwinnett Chamber includes residents and businesses from the cities of Berkeley Lake, Norcross, and Peachtree Corners. The voluntary business association also meets at the Atlanta Tech Park on Thursday mornings for Coffee Connections.
Bernhardt has facilitated the strategic planning process for more than 50 organizations. For 13 years, he wrote a bi-monthly marketing column for the Atlanta Business Chronicle. He received his MBA from the Harvard Business School and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Value of strategic planning
To kick things off, Bernhardt asked the room containing about 50 professionals whether their company has a strategic plan. While many hands went up, most were lowered when Bernhardt asked if the process was successful.
“Strategic plans can be very valuable when tied to some of the problems that businesses have today,” Bernhardt said. “It provides focus, helps you make better decisions, [and] can align your organization so everybody is on the same page about where you’re headed, which is often a problem in my mind.”
Bernhardt said a business plan differs from a strategic plan, which should identify the most important things an organization needs to do over the next three to five years.
“Even though it can be incredibly valuable as a resource for a company, lots of organizations managed to screw it up,” he said.
Bernhardt gave 10 reasons strategic planning often fails, including not having the right people in the room, failing to create two to four priorities, and forgetting about each strategy’s success metrics.
He suggests creating a mission and vision statement at the end of the process, involving as many internal and external stakeholders as possible, and focusing on priorities.
Real-world examples in metro Atlanta
During his career, Bernhardt worked on strategic planning with Hands on Atlanta, a nonprofit that connects businesses and the community with volunteering opportunities.
Hands On Atlanta built its business connecting major corporations in the metro area with nonprofits in need of volunteers. As some of its biggest clients, like Delta Air Lines, began to bring the service in-house, Hands On Atlanta needed to adjust.
The strategic plan included ways the nonprofit could continue to tap into its large corporate clients while doubling its efforts to attract small and midsize companies that lack the resources to organize their own employees’ volunteer opportunities.
“The strategic plan called for changing focus in terms of creating what they did through the internet; you can come online now and sign up with your family for a Saturday,” Bernhardt said. “Guess how long the mission statement took? Twenty minutes at the end of the process.”
Focus on Southwest Gwinnett
One attendee at the luncheon asked how her new nonprofit should approach strategic planning despite not having a board of directors.
“If you don’t have a board, you still need the key people in your organization at the table, the ones who really know how the work actually gets done and who will be responsible for making the plan happen,” Bernhardt said. “Funders want to see a strategic plan before they invest. The leading capital‑campaign consultants I work with will not take on a campaign if the organization doesn’t have a strategic plan.”
For small business owners, Bernhardt said it’s a good idea to revisit the strategic plan monthly.
“If everything is a priority, then nothing is. You have to decide what you’re not going to do or not going to keep doing, because that’s where the resources for the new strategic priorities come from,” he said.