The Planning Process: SWOT Up And Get SMART

With rolling lockdowns and forever-changing pressures being placed on our time and availability, such as home-schooling and store closures, putting any sort of business plan in place right now might feel a bit hopeless.

But, as one of my favorite sayings goes “Plans are useless, planning is priceless”. No matter what the outcome and how things may change, reviewing your goals and ambitions is imperative for you, at the very least, to get an idea of what you actually want for you and your business going forward.

In episode 24 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I want to take you through my personal Planning Process and help you use SWOT Analysis and SMART objectives to build a robust set of goals that will help you map out your sales and stock plans for the year ahead and beyond.

We’ll look at using a SWOT Analysis to give yourself and your business the equivalent of an annual review, to figure out where things currently stand. I’ll ask you where you want you and your business to be in the future and what success looks and feels like to you. We’ll use SMART objectives to take your newly-formed hopes and goals and make sure they’re specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

By following my planning process and implementing these developmental tools we can get closer to making those plans, and the growth of you and your business, a reality.