By Tony Monisse
Strategic Plan Mastery: 6 Questions that will transform your business next yearÂ
As we approach the end of the financial year, it is that time when business owners are setting their strategic plans for FY2025-26. My experience is that the most successful business owners aren’t necessarily doing more—they’re focusing on the right things.
Most business owners aim to grow sustainably and profitably. Yet many are struggling with project fatigue, talent challenges, and implementing new technologies effectively. In the current environment, developing an agile strategic plan has never been more important.
Based on the above, you may ask what aspects of an agile strategy small business owners need to consider. The most critical questions relate to where there may be gaps in their strategic plan:
Six Questions for Strategic Clarity in the Year Ahead
- Market Fit: Are You Solving Tomorrow’s Problems?
How will your strategy adapt to emerging trends and disruptions we’ve seen already in 2025? From our experience, businesses often allocate resources based on historical patterns rather than future needs. Success in this area means establishing a clear connection between market changes and your specific offerings, with resources deliberately allocated to areas of growing demand.
A Perth-based engineering firm recently discovered that by redirecting just 15% of their budget toward emerging client needs, in terms of having sufficient stock to meet customer order demands for fast-moving stock, they increased new business by 37%. To start addressing this in your business, identify your three most profitable services or products from the past year and critically ask: Are these likely to remain your growth drivers in the year ahead?
- Vision Clarity: Can Your Team See Where You’re Heading?
Have you developed a well-documented vision and a one or two-word theme for the year ahead? Many business owners struggle to distill their strategic direction into a clear, compelling message. Yet when every team member can articulate your company’s direction and their role in it without hesitation, you’ve found a powerful strategic advantage.
With a client, we recently facilitated a strategy review meeting where after a period of strong growth, the theme for the next 12 months is ‘stabilise and optimise’.Â
Finding your strategic sweet spot begins with creating a clear vision and theme for the year that focuses on your highest payoff activities versus wasteful undertakings. Test this with your most trusted team members—if they can’t immediately grasp and repeat it, your vision isn’t clear enough yet.
- Strategic Foresight: Are You Prepared for Disruption?
How can your planning embrace what-if scenarios to prepare for potential challenges? A key point about strategic planning is that it’s not about predicting the future perfectly; it’s about building adaptability into your business model. The businesses that thrive maintain viable plans even when market conditions shift, supply chains falter, or key staff depart.
The fog lifts when you can see clearly what might impact your business. Preparing a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast will immediately identify your business’s financial vulnerabilities and create the foundation for meaningful contingency plans. This simple tool provides more strategic insight than many complex planning frameworks.
- Team Alignment: Is Everyone Rowing in the Same Direction?
How will you cascade your strategies to ensure everyone understands their contribution? How hard is your business working to ensure that strategic priorities reach every level of your organisation? In my experience, this is where most small business plans need greater attention.
With a particular client we work with, once the leadership team understood the strategy and growth ambitions of the owner, key leadership team members stepped up to bring in new business opportunities.
Success comes when each team member has clear, measurable objectives that directly support your three strategic priorities. At your next team meeting, have each person articulate how their current work connects to your company’s goals—the gaps will reveal themselves immediately. This simple exercise often uncovers misalignments that have been draining productivity for months.
- Execution Rhythm: Do You Have a Cadence for Accountability?
What execution cadence will you embrace to drive forward your strategies? The foundations for business success include regular, structured reviews that maintain momentum without creating an administrative burden. The businesses that consistently meet their strategic goals implement monthly strategy reviews where they examine key financial and non-financial metrics, make necessary adjustments, and hold the team accountable.
From our experience, the single most important step you can take right now is to block 3-hour quarterly strategy review meetings in your calendar for the entire financial year. When the meeting is in the diary, it becomes a priority, and what gets scheduled gets done. These sessions become the heartbeat of your strategic execution.
- Change Readiness: Can Your Team Adapt Quickly?
How will you boost your probability of change success for new initiatives? From our experience, businesses that thrive are those that can implement change efficiently. Yet many businesses struggle to adapt to new market realities. A successful business builds a team that embraces necessary changes with minimal resistance and maximum efficiency.
Assess your team’s change readiness by reflecting on your last significant business change, what worked well, and what you would do differently. This reflection often reveals patterns that either enable or block successful change implementation. Identifying one small, positive change you can implement builds your team’s “change muscles” in a low-risk environment.
Finding Your Strategic Sweet Spot
Take a moment to reflect: Which of these six aspects is your business strongest in right now? Which one, if improved immediately, would create the greatest positive impact on your business in the coming year?
The most successful businesses I’ve worked with didn’t try to excel in all six areas at once, they identified their biggest gap and focused on closing that gap. This focused approach allows you to build momentum that carries through to other aspects of your strategy.
Are you ready to transform your approach to strategic planning? Contact our team on (08) 6212 7200 for a no-obligation discussion about how these frameworks could be applied in your specific business context.
