Do your strategic planning sessions rehash old themes?

What if high value alignment on bold corporate direction emerged from your next strategic planning meeting?

How would full commitment to disciplined follow-through bring benefit from your strategic planning meeting to your company’s future?

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As businesses mature, the need for coherent direction becomes paramount. Most companies take time out to draw back, gain perspective (as a core planning team) and commit to direction together that will make the most of opportunity.

The best strategic plans exhibit awareness of the greater context in which the business must perform and exercise prudent choices with your most precious resource: the allocation of your discretionary time, attention and capital to create a profitable future.

Your confidence in the investment you make in strategic planning can be assured. Knowing how companies can focus their resources at different stages in their development to reach the next level is our expertise. Bringing that to bear on your next company strategic planning meeting brings a new level of effectiveness:

• the underlying issues – both internal and external – are surfaced and tackled
• the strategic priorities are nailed
• the commitment to execution is secured.

What are the gnawing worries?

• that your meeting will go flat?
• the President will talk and direct and everyone else will nod?
• you will emerge with no shared commitment to dealing with what the company must achieve in the next year?
• lack of focus, which leads to no resolution which leads to no action?

Catalyst Strategic strategic planning sessions are facilitated to win. Solid preparation means a clear understanding going in what will be a satisfying result coming out. The President can relax and participate, knowing the path the meeting follows will get to the right destination.

Team members get engaged and committed. The leader sees the company reaching but not overcommitting – building a track record of accomplishment. Meeting outcomes that matter develop. Company direction emerges and takes hold. Execution follows.

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A diversified chemical distribution company has 7 active divisions. It commissions Catalyst Strategic to assist development of separate strategic plans for each division and the parent company – ensuring that all are coordinated with overall thrusts being advanced in each one. Those are a lot of mandates to be met!

The owner and President relaxed once the plan for how all was to be accomplished was pulled together by Catalyst Strategic. Once the process got rolling, teams were engaged one by one in styles that suited each division uniquely with the corporate team having set the overall themes. Then all the plans were rolled up, adjustments were made and implementation addressed.

The plan gave direction that was unprecedented in the company. And performance followed it, with startling growth that surpassed targets in the first year of a 3 year plan. More importantly, the overall thrusts that corporate had set were met. A collateral result was exceptional development of management skills in a company that really needed it.

Catalyst Strategic has been asked back to lead the company through the next order plan.

Reference: available on request

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Stephen Le Poole
Chairman, Di-Corp

"Di-Corp is a diversified distributor of chemical products. We have been primarily directed at the oil industry but I started a push to move actively into businesses not dependent on energy.

"When Doug Bouey started to work with us, we had 7 divisions all with different uncoordinated priorities. We had tried strategic planning previously and it had not succeeded in creating coherence for us. This time, with Doug’s help, we got it right. The result of a company-wide process was:

• pulling together high participation of many different leaders
• a plan that reconciled our needs for an overall push into diversification with integration and flexibility for each of the business units
• accomplishment that moved us to our desired percentages of oil/ non oil business - cushioning us when the inevitable decline in drilling threatened our progress
• sales and profit outcomes that went well beyond our expectations

"The planning effort was worth everything that we put into it and couldn’t have happened without Catalyst Strategic’s able leadership and coordination. I unhesitatingly recommend them."