The Strategic Business Review
Strategy? What Strategy?
Starting from £3000, our Business Review is just the thing to kick-start the journey towards your business goals.
Many of the businesses we meet, large or small, don’t really have a strategy. By this, we don’t mean that they have no strategy at all – they do. Rather, we mean that a fully worked through, comprehensive strategy, involving people right through the business, does not exist. Taking everything apart, investigating and researching the outside world, tinkering and putting it back together requires a great deal of hard thinking and time.
The Real World
There is always a set of pressing priorities that make proper strategic thinking something to put off. Instead, those running businesses make do with what they know from our ordinary day-to-day dealings with the world. We get by.
Strategy is often something only in the heads of the one or two people running the business, and is just assumed to be understood and known. We muddle through. If you run a business you might well recognise this situation.
It’s a tough world and we find ways of coping, of making do. We still have a desire to do a better job of strategising, but as Harold MacMillan said, “events, dear boy, events”.
Trust
There is another barrier too. It helps to have an outsider’s view, another pair of dispassionate eyes, but where do you find such people?
How can you be sure they are the kind of people you want to put your trust in?
And is a full strategy a big expense to risk on unknown quantities?
The “bump start” Solution
At FD4 we have been giving these barriers some thought. We know a lot of people could really use our services, but they don’t approach us because of the barriers. We can’t really sell what we do on a “try before you buy” basis, so we have come up with the next best thing – the Business Review.
Our Business Review is a mini-strategic exercise. It gets the ball rolling and, if you want, can be converted into the bigger exercise later. It involves key staff. It looks inside and outside the business. It gives you an opportunity to try us out for relatively little expense.
At the end, it leaves you with fresh thinking and new or clarified ideas and priorities. It’s also fun, stepping away from the day-to-day for some mental stimulation and fresh perspectives. It can be inspirational.
The Business Review was very successful. It caused us to monitor how and why, we are where we are currently, as well as what we want to become in the future and how we do it. A great team and great project
MCFP
What Does It Involve?
We work with you to cover the key ground that any strategic exercise needs to cover – SWOT, PEST, financial analyses, market analyses and so on. We don’t go overboard in massive exercises. These are intended to be focused and targeted, to uncover as much as possible in as short a time as possible.
They aren’t a substitute for a full strategic review and documented 3 to 5 year plan. They are the first steps. It’s an easy way to get the difficult stuff started.
You also get to work with battle-hardened finance professionals and experienced marketing professionals, providing the diversity of thinking critical to dispassionate analysis.
Although these are short exercises, we have no desire to be in and out quickly, disappearing with your money. We do these because we are looking for long-term relationships with people we like, helping companies to grow and achieve exceptional potential.
We want to be part of the journey.
We expect to have to live with our mistakes.
Where Do You Want To Be in 3 to 5 Years?
You want to grow your company over the next few years. You need a proper strategy and a plan of how to get to there from here successfully. You want to find the right people to help you make that happen.
Our ‘bump start’ Business Review might be just the thing to get that whole process on the road.
It costs from £3,000.
Give us a call or contact us here and find out more.
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