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Erica Olsen
Erica Olsen is cofounder and COO of M3 Planning, Inc., a firm dedicated to developing and executing strategy. M3 provides consulting and facilitation services, as well as hosts products and tools such as MyStrategicPlan for leaders with big ideas who want to empower and focus their teams to achieve them.
Articles & Books From Erica Olsen
Cheat Sheet / Updated 01-11-2023
A strategic plan is essential for a successful business, and creating a strategic plan that you can actually use is key. Your plan should include certain elements, like mission, values, and vision statements. It should also avoid common pitfalls, like neglecting the specific needs of your organization, so it becomes your road map for success.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
When developing a strategic plan, you need a dynamic way to look at your performance month after month because you’d like to see whether you’re growing or shrinking. The Trailing 12 Months (T12M) chart, developed by Kraig Kramers — founder of CEO Tools — can help you track monthly sales for your last 12 months.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
You can strategically grow by leveraging your product knowledge to reach new customers. More than likely, you’ve spent time and money developing your product and service offering. Assuming you’re happy with your current offering, extending it into new markets is a logical next step. Taking that next step is aptly called a market development strategy.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Having a strategic plan and a succinct strategy that brings clarity and focus to your organization ensures that your time, resources, and actions aren’t wasted. Planning for the future is important, but very few businesses actually do it. Following are some warning signs that tell you whether you need a new strategy for your strategic planning process.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Strategic planning has a basic overall framework. Not to oversimplify the strategic planning process, but by placing all the parts of a plan into the following three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces of your plan fit together:
Where are we now? Review your current strategic position and clarify your mission, vision, and values.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
After you’ve decided that strategic management is the right tool for your organization, clarifying what you intend to achieve with the outcome of the planning process is critical to a successful process. Strategic planning means different things to different people, so agreement is critical to reaching the desired end state.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
In order to put a strategic plan together that gets you from Point A to Point B effectively and efficiently, you need a system in place to help you achieve the end result. This process is continuous and cyclical, and in a disciplined mode, it requires a focus and pattern to stay on track and be productive while enjoying the journey along the way and learning from it.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
At the end of the day, what is strategic planning all about? Growth. Businesses strive to grow more customers, more sales, positive cash flow, larger deal sizes, higher volume, more billable hours, justification for higher prices, and so on.
Ask any hardworking entrepreneur what he or she is working on and you’re bound to hear a comment related to growth.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
A common trend in compensation plans is to pay for performance. No doubt about it; people pay attention when it comes to their own pocketbooks. Linking performance to short-term goals and action items in your strategic plan is a natural connection. Performance-based compensation is a huge way to structure performance plans.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
After you’ve developed an analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT), you can identify the alternatives or choices to build your strategic plan around. Remember that by itself, a SWOT isn’t actionable. But by matching up factors from one quadrant with factors in another quadrant, you can start to identify potential actions based on the SWOT anaylsis.