Does your business vision direct your strategy?

Author: Chris Swan

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Every business owner has a vision of what their business is or could be. It often relates to what they perceive their unique competencies to be, what they're passionate about or what role they play for customers/clients.

But as service businesses grow or evolve, this vision can be eroded or the design and operations of the business might drift away from their origins. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but commonly business owners find it hard to draw a line between where they started and where they are now - or at least they can't explain the strategy underlying their businesses journey.

This is problematic, because without clarity of vision and its influence on service design and business operations, businesses tend to stifle their growth or drift away from the needs/expectations of clients and customers. It might be intimidating, but every business needs to stop and audit whether they have strayed from their initial vision, whether that vision is still valid for their current operating environment and whether the vision they hold truly drives the strategic direction of the business and its operating model.

What we are describing here is a strategic service vision - a vision that reconciles the aims of the business, the needs/expectations of the consumer/client, the operating model and delivery of the service to market.

The importance of a strategic service vision is perhaps best explained with some generic examples of what tends to happen with out one.

Consider a service business that sees itself as customer focused. It has built its marketing collateral and brand image up as - a firm that offers divergent and unique service experiences to its customers. While the business was true to this image for a time, at one point they began leveraging information communication technologies to scale up without increasing cost associated with labour. Before they knew it, their operating model was based in ICT and virtual servicescapes and they were incapable of executing the divergent and unique service experiences their customers and clients either needed or expected of them.

It can go the other way as well. Many times I've seen professional service firms use ICT to reduce barriers to market entry and offer a standardised, cost effective service at a budget price to grab some initial market share. But over time the business looks for more market share through diversified service offerings, trying to offer something different to everyone only to realise down the line that they hadn't designed their service or systems to cater for this.

The above examples are deliberately generic but paint a picture of just how easy it is overtime to forget about your initial vision, or make business decisions that are in conflict with it. You may even see some of your own business in these vague examples.

Businesses proceed in these ways and make these conflicting decisions because the ramifications are not always clear or immediate. That decision to stray away from your standardised service offering might have felt right at the time or generated some fruitful business in the short term. But long term you're stuck wondering why you can't grow beyond a certain point or why your processes seem so bloated and inefficient now.

It's only when we step back that we realise we don't recognise the business vision anymore, and that the service concept we're bringing to market doesn't match the operating strategy. Maybe we don't serve the needs and expectations of the market anymore - maybe we don't even recognise the market we're in.

But it's never to late to take stock, find your market, articulate a service vision, align your operating strategy and design a delivery system that brings it all together.

Stopping to create your strategic service vision might just unlock new value, clear operational roadblocks and create a framework to make consistent and strategic business decisions down the line.

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Chris Swan is the Director (Owner) of Swan Consultancy.

If you would like further information on the value of strategic service vision planning and auditing, Chris Swan is available for consultation on this and other business and management issues.