22 Ways a CFO Can Help You Create A Winning Strategic Plan

Creating a well thought-through, comprehensive strategic plan is an arduous task. However, it is fundamental to businesses of any size.  It can increase your profits, increase your chance of success, help tackle challenges that arise and assist in securing funding as and when required.

Thinking through objectives and likely outcomes which may occur many years down the line is, by nature, challenging. But it is the hard work up front which makes for lighter work down the road as well as a better chance of profits and reaching your goals.

Creating a solid plan

An experienced CFO (Chief Financial Officer), in particular, our part-time/as needed CFOs, can make a significant contribution.

Our CFOs often find their clients have done some good planning and strategic thinking but need a devil’s advocate to ask the right questions and help to steer the ship in the right direction. Being a CEO without a high level ‘finance person’ to bounce ideas off can be tough. CFOs often possess a different albeit complementary set of skills to CEOs.

We highly recommend you take the time out to work through the detail of your strategic plan. It is rare to see a company succeed if it doesn’t have a robust plan.

The CFO Centre will provide you with a highly experienced senior CFO with ‘big business experience’ for a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO. Your CFO will work closely with you to develop your strategic plan and your timetable for implementation to:

1. Gain a full understanding of the business and its operating procedures.
2. Work through the existing strategic plan with you and make necessary changes to build a plan which clarifies how the company’s objectives can be realistically achieved.
3. Agree on milestones and break down the plan into annual and quarterly targets.
4. Conduct a fresh SWOT (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats) analysis bringing the plan up-to-date.
5. Conduct a new PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) analysis bringing the plan up to date.
6. Carry out a full competitor analysis to understand in detail what is and isn’t working in the market.
7. Explore opportunities for effective market research to enable innovation and development of new products/channels to market/operating procedures.
8. Identify key players in the business.
9. Identify skill gaps in the business.
10. Agree financial incentive structures to retain and motivate key members of the team.
11. Identify five key metrics for determining what the future course of the business should look like.
12. Agree on the exit or succession strategy.
13. Develop a clear, coherent message (vision/mission/purpose) to staff and to customers.
14. Work with the senior team to ensure individual department goals are aligned with the big picture strategy.
15. Agree on a who/what/when set of objectives for all department heads.
16. Implement accountability protocol for every member of staff.
17. Determine methodology which allows the senior team to course correct periodically when a change in strategy is required.
18. Agree on delegation of authority to department heads to spread responsibility across the business and to free up the CEO’s time.
19. Create a feedback route so that strategic goals are regularly shared with staff
20. Develop a set of relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and a system which allows for regular (daily/weekly/monthly/annual) monitoring and reporting.
21. Develop a long-term efficient tax structure for the business and for key employees.
22. Identify key outsource suppliers/advisors and, in particular, corporate finance contacts

This process will instil a deep feeling of confidence both within the senior team and throughout the rest of the business.

You will move out of the chaos and into a more serene working environment where each of the cogs, which make up the bigger system, is able to move in harmony.

Don’t leave success to chance.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business with a strategic plan, phone us on 0800 422 121 or watch this quick video on How It Works.