We are going through our annual strategic planning process right now at Everon.  We are still two weeks away from our actual meeting, but we are already seeing great benefits, which gets to the heart of why a strategic planning process is so valuable:

1. It makes you take the time to step back and evaluate how you are currently doing things
2. It increases communication amongst your team
3. It makes  you clarify your most important goals and provides a fresh sense of focus on achieving them.

I’m not really expecting any major strategic revelations to come out of our planning meetings, but that isn’t really the point.  Our team hustles so fast every day that we rarely, if ever, get to sit down as a group to think about how we are operating every day and if we are spending time on the things that are most valuable to our business and our customers.

As part of our planning process, each of our department heads is doing a thoughtful analysis on their area of the business, and we are all gaining valuable insights.  We’ve already uncovered a few “duh!” areas in our company that are such obvious opportunities for improvement that it seems like we have been blind not to notice them.

Even if you don’t expect any strategic revelations, go through the process with your team and have the meetings - you will gain more from it than you had orginally expected.