Strategic planning for a barbecue and soul food restaurant

Strategic Planning

The business that I want to start is a small barbeque and soul food restaurant. This business will have one location to begin with. The business will be defined by the quality of the food and the fun, comfortable atmosphere of the restaurant. This paper will first explain the benefits of strategic planning, and then outline some of the strategic plan for my new restaurant.

Strategic planning is "an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working towards common goals and ensure that the organization is setting its direction in relation to the external environment (BSI, 2013). Thus, strategic planning begins with a mission and vision for the company and what it wants to accomplish. These things underpin the actions and directions that the company wants to take.

There are several different elements of the strategic plan. These include the mission, the vision, the overall strategic direction, the tactics and the controls. There are also a number of pitfalls that can trip up a company that is trying to put together an effective strategic plan. For example, many plans are bogged down by vague or fuzzy language. Ashkenas (2013) notes that common phrasing such as "leverage our world class operating capabilities" or other such language actually says nothing about what the company is going to do, and how it will do it. So for a restaurant you cannot just talk about having "the best food, great service and a fun atmosphere," you actually need to have a sense of what these words mean in order to have an actionable strategy.

The strategy description also needs to be specific and proactive. Tough questions should not be avoided and there should be embedded in the strategic plan enough clarity and sense of purpose that everyone at the company understands what is necessary to achieve these objectives. Conerly (2013) highlights the importance of having a strategy that has clear actionable plans -- if the actions that derive from the strategy are vague then they are insufficient and this is a problem for the overall strategy. So when designing the strategy for this restaurant we want to have a very specific vision in mind of who we are, what we do and how we are going to do it. Only then can the strategy be devised and executed properly.

So a strategic plan is important to the success of the business in a couple of ways. First, it defines the business. You must know who you are and where you are going. Second, the strategic plan defines the terms of success. No business can claim to be a success if it has no idea what success is. The definition of success will be embedded in the mission, the vision and the strategy. Furthermore a strategic plan will have specific success measures, so it is clear that by having success measures the company can work to those measures.

Four Functions of Management

The four functions of management are planning, organizing, leading and controlling (Norman, 2013). Planning is obviously embedded in strategic management, but the other elements are as well. Planning requires having a strategy in mind, because the strategy is going to guide the direction of the plan. However, organizing is also closely linked to the strategic management process. When there is a strategic plan in place, strategic organizing requires that there be an organizing of resources in order to execute the plan. Thus, having a broad vision for the company provides specific guidance to the company with respect to how it should use its resources.

Leading is another critical element. There are two areas where leading intersects with strategic management. The first is that strategic management provides the guidepost for where the leader should be guiding the company. Leadership implies that there must be a direction in which one is being lead, and the strategic plan provides that direction. Strategic management is essential the combination of leadership and resource deployment. Leadership works less with the resources that it does with the mission and vision part of the strategy. The company is able to be motivated by strong leadership and that is something that can only be provided by strategic management

Finally, controlling is based on the strategic plan. Where the strategic plan provides the company with objectives, the control process is where the measures that were set out in the management plan are evaluated against the actual results. Management uses this evaluation to identify areas of weakness and then adjust the strategy. So this is a critical factor in the success of the company, to use the success measures that were identified in the strategic plan as a control mechanism.

Guiding Principles

Excellence has to be the number one guiding principles and the customers are going to define that for us. We want to have a culture that is like a backyard barbeque, loud social and everybody having fun. This we want to embed deeply into the strategy because it is not always easy to create that vibe unless you work at it.

In terms of social responsibility and ethics, that is not something we put in the mission statement, but we do want to have an ethics statement. We are an equal opportunity face-stuffer -- anybody can work here and anybody can eat here. It's that simple. Respect for everybody, for the community and for the environment. It's a simple concept that some people act like it's complicated, but respect is not complicated.

The mission and vision guide us towards competitive advantage because the benchmarking puts us directly against the competition. We are going to specifically be better than them, and that is how we will win competitive advantage. In the restaurant business, if you are not better every day you will not be number one. So it important that are mission statement defines our desire to outperform. This is not sustainable competitive advantage, we know that, but that will come when we prove ourselves over a long period of time, and we become iconic and everybody knows our name. You earn being number one, and that is what we will do.