Cowden Consulting Strategic Planning for Business Success

How to create, drive and sustain change in the workplace 
Executive Summary Change is the only constant in business.The challenge is that success reduces the need for change, until it is too late. Businesses which continually succeed do so because they respond to the changes in their market. Those which can adopt the quickest and proactively succeed in adapting and developing to meet their customers needs, succeed at the expense of those that are unable, unwilling or slowest to adapt.  The drivers of change in business are often driven by a company failing to achieve outcomes in turnover and profit. Change of course is easy to talk about doing, but difficult to achieve.  Changing anything that exists takes more than suggestions, words or even plans. In this article I want to share how I work with high growth organisations to create and sustain change and remove the blocks and active opposition to change within an organisation.

In today's flat rather than traditional hierarchical …

Summary: What to focus on in selling your business. 
The time to sell your business is when you want out. The best time is when you have a new exciting project that you want to commit to. The optimum time to sell is when investors are excited by your sector and your business is in tip-top fighting condition within a dynamic market.  This simple checklist should be at the heart of all business owners when looking to define their exit strategy timetable.  Buyers buy because of the potential they can see in making money from the business they are buying. They will pay a premium for a well-run company, with a motivated and dedicated management team, delivering efficient processes to loyal customers.     
Buyers ExpectationsBuyers look at potential business acquisitions through the lens of perceived financial risks and rewards. Buyers weigh up the potential rewards over 3 to 5 years both in terms of profits coupled with its potential asset value (share value) as their return on their exit pla…

The challenger brand model is a strategic approach to a market that works for aspirational brand leaders to take ownership and consolidate a particular position for their unique offering within a market. The challenger brand model is business strategy that changes the landscape of a market, by shifting the entire premises of a market's assumptions about its underlying structure.  Changing the premises of the market's structure is how disruptive technologies are brought to market by challenger brands.

The fundamental premise of challenger brand model is that it is a whole business strategy for the business, not just the marketing and sales functions. The challenger brand model success relies upon it being a clear strategically focused in carrying the whole business into a new place within its market sector(s), not just routes to market into a true partnership throughout the entire value pipeline.
This shift is about partnership proactive participation in the challenger attitude …

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Strategy
The leader is the person ultimately in charge of defining the corporate goals of any organisation. It is the one role which a leader cannot delegate.  Strategy is the course to take to achieve your organisation goals. Without a strategy any organisation drifts aimlessly within its market, loosing its position and its customers. A clear set of goals allows a strategy  to be developed to achieve those goals, enabling the organisation to focus, find its direction and pull together towards those goals. 



Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay provides both the hard tools to assess and develop your goals and strategy and the soft tools which enables leader's to successfully implement those strategic shifts within their organisation.     


Leading From the FrontIt is difficult to lead if you don't know where you are going and in this book, Richard Gourlay explains how to use key tools …

Drive Your Vision or Amlessly Drift 

In today’s world, driving your business vision is the only way to ensure you stay focused on where you want to go and not pulled by short-term fads and fashions.  The words strategic planning used to mean a once a year offsite discussion about where the organisation is headed. That thinking would be turned into an updated business plan with expectations and outcomes to be delivered over that next year. That type of strategic planning the corporate away-day provide very little in the way of strategic thinking and subsequently provided no or very little strategic value. Corporate away days became more a morale booster, with team building and bonding as the only measure of development. The reason why was very simple, if there is no strategic intent, no strategic review or re-evaluation them there will be no strategic outcomes.   




Strategic thinking is more vital today for leaders of organisation than ever before. The need for organisations of any shape a…

Leaders Must look beyond the Horizon for Success: (Five Tips For Moving Beyond Certainty in Business) It is always easy to look backwards and see how a business has evolved to where it is today, than to look at where a business is today and predict where it will go in the future. Looking backwards from essence of an idea, to the formative stage in which it was created and how it has evolved to where it is now, journeys look logical and rationale. When leaders look at their business, the rational behind the direction setting they took seems obvious today and makes perfect sense, but the truth is that at the time of making those vital decisions it was not.  

Making decisions about the future is never easy and certainly not simple. The lack of information about the future, the uncertainty of what will happen within any sector and the singularity of ownership of the big decision weight on leaders minds often leads to procrastination and delay.

Seeing beyond the horizon, to what the worl…