Understanding the NOW and WHERE of your Patrons, Products, Promotion, and People are key parts of developing long-term strategy.  Even if you have an understanding of all of those things, though, you’re still missing some key elements.  Most significantly, how will you know you’ve been successful? Measuring success requires you to develop and use key … Read more

So far in our strategic planning model we have talked about patrons, products, and promotion.  What about the people, your employees?  Who will support all your clients(finance, admin, etc.)?  No strategy can get very far without considering the human element. When businesses think about the people they have or want, they usually think in terms of … Read more

The last two posts have discussed who we want to sell to and what we want to sell to them.  So how are we going to get those people to buy those products?  Now we’re talking about Promotion – aka, marketing and sales. There have been thousands of books written about marketing and sales.  We could … Read more

At first glance, this seems pretty simple.  What are your key products?  Most businesses could name those.  They may really only have one key product.  The problem is that products – like businesses – have a life cycle.  And there are no exceptions.  Every product has a growth phase, a plateau phase, and a decline phase.  … Read more