It is an intricate exercise to pinpoint what measures can be done when the future of a business is unclear. The issue represents a crossroad situation requiring no-nonsense technical and intuitive analysis. The challenge comes at a time in the life of the business where all the stakes – people, money, structure, technology, systems, rights, obligations, relationships, and image – have been put into place.
Whatever preconceived notions that management might have on the business because of its unclear future, whether to continue and streamline, sell to novel investors, or cease operations, the span and complexity of the analytical requirement remains the same for all options. In fact, it is a professionally demanding task, even more difficult than visioning the future of the business during its inception.
My management and consulting experience tells me that the horizon of having a fine glimpse of the future becomes even more sketchy and nebulous if the company had evolved from a loose business platform that lacked solid research and planning foundation. In many instances, companies are hurriedly residence up to corner immediate business opportunities, either chanced upon by the owners, tipped off by a friend or relative, prompted by a fad or trend, or driven by some success tale for which investments are made without much critical thinking.
It is a global business reality that most organizations, those loosely conceived on the "fast money, snappily growth" perspective, usually do not live long to see their future. While organizations, predicated upon and guided by well-meaning strategic plans indicate a current capacity to outlive their initial business charter.
As it appears, "what to do with an unclear business future" is a current, true-to-business-life issue that leads us back to the basic organizational assumption of treating a business as a "going concern." This tenet postulates that any business venture must be set up for long-term continuity, sufficiently provisioned to retort to the external, competitive, and internal factors affecting the viability of the enterprise. Otherwise, there is no basis for mobilizing a new investment that is barren of meaningful business and social significance. The inclusion of the social component draws enormous importance from the fact that every business is inherently impressed with the responsibility to be a partner of society in the development and growth of national interest.
The cardinal rule from a professional standpoint on what to do in trying to resolve an unclear business future is to go into strategic management planning. A strategic management plan is a revisiting tool and controlling blueprint that embodies what the company wants to become, what is the nature of its business, what are the key external, competitive, and internal factors it must addressed, what are its long-term objectives, what is the key strategy to meet the objectives, what are the specific actions that support the strategy, and how can the company ensure that it stays on track in the effort to meet or surpass its objectives.
Strategic planning starts from crafting a powerful vision statement, a central strategic charter that bullets clearly what the company wants to become. With vision of what it wants to be, the company can effect a compelling mission statement that presents a concise description of the nature of its business.
The next activity in the planning loop is to assess the external factors affecting the company's business. This phase focuses on analyzing the economic, social, cultural, demographic, environmental, political, legal, governmental, technological, and competitive forces that impinge on the company's strategic interests. This external analysis, which includes a comprehensive industry appraisal, ends with a resume of major opportunities and threats confronting the company.
The external analysis triggers the evaluation of the competitive environment, an exercise that compares the company with its key competitors based on a range of common critical success factors e.g. advertising, price competitiveness, financial position, customer loyalty, product quality, and other relevant variables affording a one-to-one match-up of companies in the chosen sample. As a result of this exercise, a fairly realistic indication of the company's strategic position in relation to competition is established.
With full knowledge of the external context of the business and the competitive landscape, the company acquires a good basis for undertaking an internal analysis of its key strengths and weaknesses. This stage determines whether or not the company has the internal capacity to buy advantage of major opportunities, mitigate or avoid major threats, and improve on or convert weaknesses into company strengths.
Once the external, competitive, and internal indices are clearly established, the long-term objectives of the company must thereafter be formulated and expressed in specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bounded terms. It is at this point where a view of the company's future starts to emerge because there is a strong component of visioning in setting the long-term objectives of the company.
The next most important measure in the strategic planning exercise is the identification, evaluation, and selection of strategies that can be expected to bring the company to next-level performance and to its desired future. The process involves the expend of matrix tools such as: SWOT Analysis, Strategic Position and Action Evaluation (SPACE), Boston Consulting Group Matrix, Grand Strategy Matrix, Balance Scorecard, and the Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM), a decision point tool used to evaluate and prescribe the strategy of choice.
When all indices and matrices are accurately established and a shortlist of alternative strategies are weighted and compared against each other, a clear horizon for seeing the future of the business develops. The company can then intelligently adopt the strategy of its choice because specific and indicative prescriptions on what can be done with the business come to the fore. The strategic actions that can be implemented for the business usually include: integration, market penetration, market development, product development, diversification, retrenchment, divestment, and liquidation.
The central strategy for the business must be in perfect alignment with the results of the factor, competitive, and matrix analysis and fully congruent to the idea of giving the business definitive choices of action to judge and execute, away from the uncertainties beclouding its future.
With the future in sight and the company enlightened on what it wants to become, the next step is to develop an action plan for each operating unit of the company. This step ensures that all departments perform their respective tasks in the context of the central strategy and that the long-term objectives are internalized across the organization.
The final step to see and construct a clear future for the company is to establish implementation milestones through performance metrics that will content if the company operates within the new strategic framework. The periodic evaluation of these metrics builds the basis for identifying the most appropriate corrective actions to catch should there be variances in organizational performance that could critically downgrade the fitness of the company to achieve its strategic objectives.
In a nutshell, it is an exercise of business wisdom to frame the conduct of any business on a solid strategic thought that prevents operating surprises and enables the company to chart its desired future.
