Kick-off 2025 with a Strong Strategic Plan

It’s that time of year when we’re all thinking about the new—new opportunities, eating plans, exercise routines, and chances to grow. The “new” helps us reinvent ourselves and think about a new vision for our lives and our businesses. New energy brings with it excitement and a fresh perspective to drive us back toward our goals, objectives, and missions. 

We want to help you be thoughtful in your strategic planning for 2025.  Whether you are starting fresh or reviewing where you are in your strategic planning cycle, these tips will help propel the new forward.  

New Vision  

With the desire for the “new,”  what do you think will create refreshed energy, a desire for growth, and clarity? Casting your vision. If you are the leader for the team, they expect to hear where you want to go next year. Be sure to include founders or board members in vision casting. Make sure it’s clear, concise, and gets to the heart of your organizational mission. 

You may be feeling a bit drained as we step into the close of this year and this exercise will help reignite your own energy. Here are just a few ways you can craft vision: 

1. Review the Mission:  Answer these top questions. What is your organizational mission? What drives you to keep going each day? Who are you impacting? Why is this important at this moment?  
2. Take an Inventory: In the book, “Done Before One,” the author shares templates for going through a life satisfaction score and reflection. Looking at where you currently are as a leader and as an organization provides you with clarity on where you’d like to go.  
3. Write It Out & Speak It Out: Putting pen to paper and speaking things out loud is scientifically proven to help our brains record things as fact, commit them to memory, and ensures a higher success rate. In this article from Forbes, they go deeper into the biology behind this important step.

The Starting Line

You can start over, in fact, it may be better to scrap the prior plan and do just that. As a new business owner, I find myself reflecting on the past and it puts me at a new starting line. Not everything that worked well before will work now. That includes team structures, revenue-generating strategies, processes, tools, and I could go on.  One of the best ways to review what your new strategies should be is to focus on a tried and true step, conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). 

Get your team together to contribute. I can guarantee there will be approaches that need to fall away and new things brought forward that will create a great impact for your organization. The key is to approach this exercise with no limitations. There are no rights or wrongs just yet. You want to have complete open sharing and transparency, and encourage team members to come into the meeting with that mindset.  

Here are a few ways to guide the conversation: 

1. Write It Out: Here it is again! Use a whiteboard or large paper panels to write out and record what is shared.  Much more impactful for everyone to see it. If you are a remote team, try to gather together in person, or be sure to use an online whiteboard to create visibility in the sharing.
2. Note the Strengths: Raise questions, such as:  What were our strengths across our offerings this year? Our team? Processes? What worked well? For nonprofits, look at your core categories of programs, development, volunteering, marketing and communications efforts, internal team structure and culture. For-profits, look at revenue-generating solutions/offerings, operations, team culture, team structure, and business development. 
3. Name the Weaknesses: Raise questions, such as: “What didn’t work well this year?” “What did we plan that didn’t come to fruition as expected?” Focus on the same categories as above. 
4. Outline the Opportunities: With the above answers in mind, ask your team to outline what opportunities may be presenting themselves. Ask questions such as, “What could we leverage as an opportunity this year?” Again, focus on the business categories that are impactful for your organization.  
5. Identify the Threats: This allows you and others to see what may hold you back from achieving goals this year. Ask questions like, “What may keep us from meeting the goals/stepping into these opportunities?” This piece of the process also helps you to identify gaps in team, dollars, processes, etc.
   

Set Strategic Priorities 

Now that you’ve gathered some key insights from your team, you can review and outline the most important areas to focus on for the year. Stepping away from the above exercise allows you as the leader to narrow your focus areas. I like to use the 1,3,5 framework to craft priorities. This model can be used for the year, each quarter, and each month to properly plan and track your goals. You can outline a singular objective, or outline your top three for the year and craft a 1,3,5 plan for each objective.

Here are the key elements: 

• Outline Your Objective 
• Outline the Top Three Goals to Support the Objective 
• Outline up to Five Actions for each Strategy 

Make sure that the goals you outline are SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Relevant, and Time-bound and that they tie back to your overall mission and vision. This also allows you to set performance metrics that the team can track to. 

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. 

Presenting the goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics to meet the goals creates clarity across the organization. It provides team members with a view into how their specific roles and responsibilities impact the goals, and gives structure to individual goals.  

With this shared knowledge, everyone is clear on what the focus areas are. Why the repetition? Sharing this once isn’t sufficient. It’s a great practice to present monthly to see how the organization is progressing toward the goals. Being consistent and repetitive solidifies the goals with the team. You want to get to the point where everyone can easily verbalize the vision and the goals for the year. 

Assess & Adapt 

Throughout the year, you’ll want to assess where you are and determine if things need to be adjusted. Starting with a strong plan is great, but don’t be afraid to quickly adjust if something isn’t working. You’ll see it fairly quickly and you can bring it to the team to brainstorm different approaches.  

Working through a strategic plan takes time, and it’s important to carve out the appropriate time and activities to support building your plan. I encourage you to get this started now before the beginning of the year (if you haven’t already) to at least have a framework you’d like to launch in the new year.  

If you are in the assess and adapt phase based on your planning cycle, take a look at what may need to change in the new year and realign your team on the new plan.  

To successful planning! 

Bloom Communications can help guide you and your team through an impactful, efficient, and successful strategic planning project. Contact us today at hello@bloomcommunications.com to learn more! 

Topics covered in this insight: 2025 strategic planning, strategic plan