What are the benefits of strategic planning?
- How will it help us stay innovative and focused on the future?
- How will it help me grow revenue and increase the value of my company?
- What’s the impact of strategic planning on organizational performance?
These are the kinds of questions business leaders have in mind when evaluating the effectiveness of strategic planning. But rather than listen to us extoll the virtues and ROI of planning, we prefer to let our clients speak for our work.
This is Part 2 of our case study interview with John Maier, President and CEO of Blue Microphones. In this video, John talks about the results he and his team have achieved since they’ve started working with us. (If you missed our previous post, you can find it here: Why did you reach out to The Oken Company? (Part 1)
Here’s the rest of the interview:
How Has CEO Coach Brian Oken Helped Your Team? (Part 3)
How Does Working With a CEO Coach Help You as a Leader? (Part 4)
Why Hire an Outside Business Consultant? (Part 5)
Transcript:
Let’s talk about ROI. Specifically, what kind of results are you getting as a result of working with The Oken Company?
We grew over 30 percent last year, which is a big jump again in growth, and that’s a direct result of being more organized, being better communicators, having an executive team that’s on the same page.
There’s not a lot of inefficiencies, not a lot of fluff and noise. We tend to focus in on exactly what we’re here to do.
So there’s the business core metrics, and those are going well, and improving, actually, even though we’ve been growing. But the other measurement is around our valuation metrics, like… What are the things that we look at that add value to the company?
We did a survey of our executive team a year ago, and then did the same survey, again, this year, and you can see just our own impressions of what we’re strong at as a company and as a group, and what we’re weak at, has shifted.
We were pretty critical of ourselves a year ago, and we’ve attacked some of these things, and we’ve seen a much bigger improvement around process, around hiring, and around focus: making sure that we’re doing the right things that fit our strategy as opposed to the bright shiny objects: “Well, there’s an opportunity, there’s an opportunity…”
That’s what we used to do. We would just take every opportunity that came.
Now we go, “Wait a minute, we’ve got a clear strategy, and that actually doesn’t fit it. It’s nice, it’s an interesting opportunity, but it doesn’t fit our strategy. Let’s stay focused.”
That, we measurably can see that we’re doing a lot better at.