Creating and realising a company strategy form the basis for growing a business. So says Mika Sutinen, a successful entrepreneur and professional board member who became known for turning the loss-making business, Musti ja Mirri, into a million-euro concern.
“A strategy is a plan for how a company will succeed in the future. It answers the question of how the company will succeed when its customers, business environment and competitors change. A strategy is a practical, concrete guide in ordinary language – nothing more than that,” Sutinen summarises.
It bothers him that strategies are often viewed as being more complex than they really are. So it’s time to take your strategy down from the top shelf, treat it like any other tool and get to work. Here’s how Mika Sutinen does it!
Stage 1: Understand the cornerstone of your success
Sutinen divides the strategy process into four parts. The first is understanding the cornerstone of your own success. Such understanding is best sought alongside the entire organisation.
“Every company has a special something on which its competitiveness and success are based. Whether it’s your product or service prices, employees or the product itself, it’s important to be clear about the cornerstone on which your future success will be built,” says Sutinen.
Stage 2: Form a future outlook
During the outlook stage, develop a view – alongside your employees – of how the business environment, customers and competitors will change in the coming years. This can be compared to looking ahead to World Championships, speculating on which contestants will be involved and who you’ll compete against.
“The key issue is to realise the initial stages of the strategy together with employees, to get your team members pumped up for change. People who help to form the outlook on needs for change tend to take a positive attitude to it. Simply dictating change creates resistance,” Sutinen notes.
Stage 3: Make strategic choices
Once you understand the cornerstone of your business and have an outlook on forthcoming change in the business environment, it’s time to consider how to handle it. How should your company change and what should it do differently? This stage tends to be most rewarding when an external advisor is brought in to spar during planning.
“Making strategic choices and eliminating options leaves you with a list of what needs to be changed. Visualise such change: this is how things are now, and this is how they’ll be by year X. For example, if a workshop does 100 per cent of its work as a subcontractor, but finds this challenging, it could move towards 40 per cent of its income being based on its own products or, say, maintenance services, by 2027,” Sutinen suggests.
Stage 4: Realise your company’s strategy
Sutinen has observed that the last stage – implementation – of the strategy process is often the most challenging. He asks himself why good plans are sometimes left unimplemented. Such plans are like fantastic architectural drawings that are forgotten once completed.
“Plans don’t realise themselves: their implementation requires systematic work and disciplined project management. This four-stage process becomes routine once you’ve run through it a few times. It becomes a natural part of a company’s annual development,” Sutinen emphasises.