MENU Strategic Planning Services to Help You Break Through the Noise
If you’re like most businesses, you’re feeling the pressure to succeed in an increasingly noisy and fast-moving world. You know that in order to stay ahead of the curve, you need to innovate and evolve, but it’s not easy to get started given day-to-day challenges.
That’s where our strategic planning services can help. Orion will work with you to quickly develop a clear vision and a practical roadmap to achieve your goals and stay ahead of the competition.
Delivered by experts. Trusted by business leaders.
Do you still use your pre-pandemic business model?
The pandemic changed the way people live and work, which means it’s also changed the way businesses operate. It hit the fast-forward button on new technologies that changed how our people perform work and our customers receive services.
Unfortunately, a lot of businesses still execute pre-pandemic strategies even though the world looks very different today. The problem, we found, is not that businesses don’t recognize the need to pivot. Most of them are just unsure of where to start, how to budget for it, and what the best course of action is. Traditional strategic planning requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. People in leadership positions can no longer afford to invest months in assessments and focus groups. Orion can help you overcome these challenges.
67% of well-formulated strategies die on the shelf
Businesses that have the resources to do strategic planning often find themselves in a situation where their plans get shelved due to lack of buy-in or execution. We understand that this can be incredibly frustrating, and we want to help you break through the noise. Orion’s strategic planning process is built for speed. As business process experts, we also know how to infuse strategic thinking into day-to-day management. We will facilitate creation of the goals, initiatives, communication plans and metrics that will bring your strategy to life.
Our Strategic Planning Consulting Services Includes:
Vision and Goal Setting
Every organization needs a purpose. Without purpose, functional areas become silos and the workforce becomes demotivated. Unfortunately, most vision statements are bland, generic, and non-specific. Orion will help you create a vision statement and accompanying goals that are tangible, relevant, and can be linked to day-to-day operations.
Blue Ocean and Blue Sky Strategies
Your organization must have “red ocean” goals: Strategic needs that are driven by your traditional business model. Strategic planning is also an opportunity for aspirational thinking. Orion’s team members are trained in Blue Ocean Strategy®. We have also developed Blue Sky Strategy techniques that enable you to leverage unique process capabilities to grow your business and/or expand services.
Strategy Mapping
The Strategy Map is a simple yet incredibly powerful tool. It creates alignment and structure for your strategic plan. It also very clearly communicates to people across the organization what your goals are and how all of the pieces fit together. Orion has been helping executive teams develop and utilize Strategy Maps since the mid-1990s, before the term Strategy Map was coined.
Rapid Strategy Redefinition
With the current pace of business change, many organizations need to redefine their strategies frequently now more than ever. Orion has a unique process that allows you to quickly and accurately assess strategic gaps and reposition your strategy as needed. This process is a great way to stay ahead of the curve and make timely changes that can move your organization forward.
Balanced Scorecard Development and Refinement
Properly designed and utilized, the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is the best weapon you have to manage strategy execution and assure strategic objectives are met, even as business conditions change. Orion’s approach leverages the structure from your Strategy Map to develop relevant metrics and to inform the selection of impactful strategic initiatives. We will facilitate both the executive team and an “execution team” so that your Scorecard will be effectively deployed and your organization will have internal experts who can adjust and refine the BSC as needed.
Initiative Development/Execution
The Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard make it easy to identify necessary projects and to prioritize their execution. Orion will help you charter impactful initiatives and establish project management protocols that will drive each initiative to a successful conclusion.
Integration and Change Management
Despite good intentions, many strategies fail to become a reality due to weak implementation or a lack of integrating strategic intent into everyday activities. Change management is a critical investment to ensure you bring the entire team along to support the new strategic vision, goals, and objectives. Orion’s practical CODE methodology helps you pass all the technical, behavioral and cultural barriers to implement change.
Customer Experience Transformation
Customer Experience (CX) isn’t about customer satisfaction or cool user interfaces; it is the means to redefine your place in the market. Orion’s strategic approach delivers the level of transformation needed to turn CX into your engine for sustainable growth. Learn More.
How Orion’s Rapid Strategic Planning Service Works
Orion Development Group has crafted a strategic planning process that incorporates the most effective components of multiple renowned strategies and operational excellence methodologies. This gives businesses like yours the highest probability of effectively deploying strategic initiatives and sustaining strategic success based on their unique process capabilities.
Step 1: Clarify the new picture of success
If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably not going to get there. As cliche as that may sound, it’s vital that everyone has a clear understanding of what success looks like. We’ll work with you to determine what that new picture looks like in this new world. Through market research, competitor analysis and customer feedback, we’ll help you identify the areas where your business can develop a competitive advantage.
Step 2: Assess your strategic ability to realize the new vision
We’ll also help you assess your current resources and capabilities to ensure that you have what it takes to realize the new vision. Our team has experience in a wide range of industries, so we can provide valuable insights into how best to make strategic changes.
Step 3: Build your short-term strategy map
Strategy maps are used to link and align strategic objectives and illustrate how they work in coordination to achieve your organization’s #1 goal. Once we have a clear understanding of where you want to go, we’ll help you build a strategy map that links what everyone does visually, making it easier to communicate and understand their roles.
Step 4: Launch 3-4 critical initiatives
We’ll help you identify the top 3-4 critical initiatives, and then guide and coach you through the implementation process. We can provide guidance on budgeting, resource allocation, project management and other strategic aspects to ensure success from inception to launch.
Step 5: Develop a complementary strategic scorecard
Lastly, we’ll work with you to develop a strategic scorecard that allows you to track your progress and make changes as necessary. This will help you measure the performance of key initiatives so that you can adjust accordingly for optimal outcomes.
Full Strategy Planning and Execution Process
What others say about us
Certainly some beneficial points that can be applied into our sales process and provide us with a leg up on the competition.
Awesome ability to answer a variety of tough questions. Lots of relevant examples and resources. Breadth of knowledge was impressive.
Businesses of all sizes have problems, but a lack of strategic direction can be fatal
Do any of these sound familiar:
- Your team is constantly putting out fires
- Reacting to events instead of proactively shaping them
- Always lagging behind competitors
- Difficulty staying bread of industry trends
- Inability to make informed decisions
If so, then you need help with setting your company’s strategy.
Break Through the Noise
Don’t rely on traditional, time-consuming planning processes. Let Orion help you shift from survive to thrive. Contact us today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of strategic services does Orion offer?
Orion offers a wide range of strategic services, including market and competitor analysis, strategy mapping, initiative development and execution, change management, and strategic scorecard development.
How long will it take to implement my strategy?
The time frame for implementing your strategy will depend on the complexity of the project. We can work with you to determine a timeline that works for your needs.
What industries have you worked with?
We have experience working with a wide range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, professional services, hospitality, manufacturing and retail. Because Orion has been around since the 1990s, there’s a good chance that we have experience working with firms in the industry you’re in. Reach out to us for more information.
There Are Hundreds of Companies That Does This, Why Should I Choose Orion?
Experience, Track Record, and Talent are Orion’s greatest assets and why companies have selected Orion over our competitors.
There are many companies out there promising to be the best at strategic planning, but none of them have the expertise of Orion. With over 25+ years in this business, we’ve trained 50,000+ business professionals and facilitated 500+ projects. These projects have resulted in reduced cost, increased capacity and ease of doing business, and greater employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
Business leaders want and need to be guided by the “voice of experience.” And the quality of a company’s services can only be as good as the men and women who deliver these services. That’s why Orion brings a Phenomenal Team to the table. We have no “junior” partners and no straight-out-of-school MBA graduates. Instead, Orion’s consultants hold, on average, fifteen years of professional and management experience prior to joining the Orion team and a track record of success.
We supply the skills, coaching, and project management needed to help your team achieve its goals. We “teach your team to fish” rather than making them hungry for more services. As a result, Orion’s clients enjoy long-term success because our methodology builds self-sufficiency and resilience. We build relationships and get to know your business inside and out so that we can create a custom strategy just for you.
I was initially skeptical…how can someone come in who didn’t understand our business help us to improve our business…that was alleviated after our first session. Any skepticism in the process was taken away after our first session.