Corporate Strategy

As the business and charitable world returns to life free of restrictions and lockdowns after the 18 month impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, it is becoming easier to see which businesses and charities have the best chance of building back the best.

Those businesses that had stuck most closely to their vision, mission, purpose and values through the challenges of 2020 and 2021, would be best placed to emerge the strongest when the economic environment improved.

The years 2020 and 2021 have created massive uncertainty for businesses and especially for charities. Fundraising has been severely hampered, as donors’ income has been threatened. Pressure has been placed on services and some service provision may have incurred significant additional cost. Reserves will have been plundered to ensure sustainability.

In all this uncertainty, we have learned that sticking closely to your vision, mission, purpose and values is essential for a business or charity that wants to emerge stronger. This will dictate how you deal with your customers, suppliers, donors, service users and trustees, how you treat your staff and how the wider community perceives you. We have first hand knowledge that those organisations that set up a business strategy and stayed true to their values were rewarded by customer and donor loyalty.

Simon Johnson has overseen strategy reviews in multiple sports and leisure businesses and charities. He enables Boards and management to be laser-focused on creating a strategy that can be lived and internalised to enable a business to grow, or to be part of transformative change.

He has led commercial strategy reviews, helping sports businesses to determine the best commercial approach and how best to go about increasing revenue.

Simon’s view is that Strategy and Governance go hand in hand. Any business should be appropriately structured so that they have the appropriate governance and controls to support the needs of a modern business or charity and that they can adequately deliver the strategy. This involves the Management delivering the detail of the strategy and the Board overseeing it and assuring the performance against the strategy.

So, now is a very good time to look at your business strategy and the way that you make decisions. It will give you a firm strategy and values to sustain you through challenging and good times and allow you to make decisions that are fit for the future.

Simon Johnson and SJRB can lead you through a review of your strategy and help you to come up with something that will lead the business to growth.

Corporate strategy offers a company strategic direction. Without fully understanding the abstract needs and goals of an organisation, and the competencies and resources the firm can call upon to achieve them, it is incredibly difficult to grow an organisation effectively.

Setting out a formal corporate strategy enables a business to focus multiple resources on a single objective. If a clear strategy does not exist, a business may lose sight of its main objectives and lack the drive and focus necessary to succeed. This could leave it rudderless and potentially wasting valuable funds.

A corporate strategy provides management and Board members with a benchmark to measure a firm’s success or failure. Having a clear goal in place allows business owners to ascertain by how much they have achieved (or not achieved as the case may be) their goals and highlight potential areas for improvement. It is incredibly difficult to measure the success of an organisation if there is no clarity on what the strategy actually is.

Detailed and well-thought-out corporate strategies will also enable a business to create plans and methods to continue growing despite changes in the market and the relentless ups and downs of the economy. If sales are dropping for a particular reason, having a clear strategy in place can give business owners the tools they need to formulate recovery plans or even diversify their offering into other markets. 

In addition, a company strategy can increase a firm’s value to investors to something beyond the sum of its physical and intellectual assets. By making rational and strategic choices, the probability of it succeeding in its objectives can dramatically increase — making the company a much more attractive option for potential investors. 

Finally, by defining a clear strategy, an organisation can improve decision making and motivate its employees. Without a concise plan in place at a corporate level, business and functional level units will be performing well below their optimum capabilities. The high level of decision making that is only possible at the upper echelons of a firm’s hierarchy will not only translate to better results at other decision-making levels further down the chain of command, but also help its employees feel that the business they work for has a clear direction and purpose.