You can’t afford to miss your goals… you need to take advantage of the market opportunities
Are you brainstorming a list of initiatives people just want to do, or are you making strategic choices that tie those initiatives together to create or sustain your competitive advantage? The answer to that question usually explains why you see certain companies grow while others plateau.
In our experience, the best way to build a strategic plan isn’t to go it alone. The best way is to bring in trained strategists who’ve done it before, where choices get prioritized through frameworks, not based on who has the loudest voice.
Your team has great ideas. And you’re excited by all the possibilities. But you can’t execute them all.
When you back the right bets, the market notices.
And that’s where Valen helps.
Three months after working with Valen, the right ideas are more likely to be funded, initiatives have owners, metrics, and regular reporting, and your CFO and board are smiling.
Our proprietary frameworks are designed to guide corporate and business-unit leaders through strategic planning with actionable insights, effective facilitation, and a comprehensive approach that aligns vision with resources and execution.
We’re not just experienced executives; we’re trained design thinkers, classic strategists, agile practitioners… and we’ve done this for over 25 years.
Before any sort of brainstorm, we take time to formulate and ask the big questions. The questions whose answers will guide our path.
Whether it’s a growth metric, or “done / not done” we define what success looks like for every objective
Valen provides collaborative tracking tools and sets regular accountability cadences with your senior leaders
Priorities are not just a list of initiatives, they are chosen from a strategy that defines how you’re going to win
Establish a clear, inspirational vision that aligns and guides your organization.
Develop strategies to achieve growth, competitiveness, and operational effectiveness.
Link strategic planning with annual budgeting for effective resource allocation and execution.
Establish a framework that connects long-term goals with annual budgeting, enhancing alignment and resource management.
Mid-Year Coverage
Already mid-year on your plan? Our Mid-Year Strategic Plan Assessment rates the five dimensions above, then runs a 1.5-day tune-up workshop to close the gaps.
Prior to strategic planning, we work with you to clearly articulate who you are, craft the big strategic questions facing the organization that the plan needs to answer, and set the direction within boundaries that the strategic plan should deliver. We work with you to compile critical pre-read information that ensures preparation for productive strategic planning.
In the morning of Day 1, we’re clarifying the strategic direction, and allowing participants to brain dump all the issues and opportunities they see facing the org. In the afternoon, we’re shaping and prioritizing those issues and opportunities into overarching strategic choices on where to play.
This is when we roll up the sleeves and get to work with your bigger team. We like to work in person with your senior team over 2 days to ideate and build the plan in real time.
On Day 2, we work to be clear about what winning looks like for each of those choices, and draft objectives, goals and initiatives for each Where to Play decision. Then we assess high-level supporting capabilities and systems.
We want to define here where you’ll compete, and how you’ll win in those areas.
This is where big aspirations get translated into clear prioritized actions, defining owners and the timing. Then we assess tradeoffs and identify risks, ensuring your strategy doesn’t just live in documents, it drives decision making and shapes resource allocation. The best strategic plan is one your team actually chooses to run the business. One with system visibility, that empowers leaders and managers to hold their team accountable to the plan.
Many internal planning exercises rely on brainstorming initiatives or assembling departmental wish lists. Goals are unvetted or challenged for reality. Our process starts with defining strategic questions, participant preparation, many times prior executive team alignment sessions, then uses structured facilitation to force clarity, focus, and tradeoffs. Strategic Priorities drive initiatives and goals define success. The interconnected result helps align teams to drive growth and profit typically unrealized with a less structured approach.
You’ll leave with a clear Strategic Plan that includes:
We design the process for quality and efficiency. Most engagements include:
The preparation of participants to surface potential gaps and areas of focus give us a canvas to facilitate a process to define priorities with clarity and alignment.
Executive teams work with us in a prior alignment session to spend time discussing issues and priorities that drives strategic direction for the organization to build upon in strategic planning.
Yes. We’ve helped public and private companies translate strategy outputs into board-approved strategic plans, investor narratives, and M&A preparation documents
We discuss with you upfront in our work, the options on how to manage accountability and setup a performance system.
At the end of strategic planning work, we don’t leave you with just bullets or a set of goals. We have a fully build out strategy with goals, priroities and initiatives. Out of the session you will have all the outputs referenceable immediately.
After the workshop, we set the expectation that priority owners and defined teams will refine and build out agreed-to priorities and present to sponsors. From there, you can manage the plan yourself or opt-into a Strategy Operating System. We offer:
We force precise decisions and tradeoffs. Every metric drives specific, architected action and every strategic priority and must:
Typically, your senior leadership team and key leaders who will participate or possibly lead a priority area or are subject matter experts who will add to the discussion. Typical range is 6-12 participants.
That’s okay. We’ll help you define what “winning” looks like through this process. With metrics-based exercises, we work backwards from business outcomes (e.g. revenue growth gap, margin improvement, customer mix shift) to define priorities and pathways
Our core Strategic Planning Sprint engagement starts at $35,000-$50,000 and includes full facilitation, planning tools, a finalized strategy playbook. Then there is optional strategy advisory for execution or other strategy projects that may require outside expertise to progress the strategy.
Every plan is customized to your organization’s size, complexity, and ambition
Valen’s Strategy Consulting Practice provides fact-based, strategic analysis that guides strategic decisions and creates a competitive advantage.
