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6.3. Templates for Creating Your Company Strategy – How to Work with Them?

If you decide to formulate your company strategy by drawing up a written document, you can use the templates below to help you (Hanzelková, podklady pro výuku strategického řízení, 2014).

Written Strategy - Yes or No?

Choosing to formulate your company strategy using these templates is implicitly based on the fact that your company’s strategic pillars (i.e. objectives and how to implement them) will be written down. In reality, SMEs do not view this as a dogma, though written strategies can aid in making the company more efficient in terms of certain strategic barriers, as well as implementing strategies more efficiently. If the formulized strategy is well-written, it may be a relatively brief text (re: tables below), and can be only tens of pages long.

ATTENTION: How to Work with Templates - Several Practical Suggestions for Working with Various Types of Templates

Below, you will find a complete set of templates for all of the potential types of strategies that you can set for your company:

Corporate strategy which can help define a wide strategic framework (direction) for your company as a whole,
Business strategy can aid in defining detailed strategies for individual, strategically differentiated activities or directions of your company (i.e. strategic business units, or SBUs), and
Individual functional strategies – strategies for marketing, finance, human resources, purchasing, production.

In practice, however, you will only select the strategies that are of importance to your company:

For smaller companies with several SBUs it is beneficial to formulate a corporate business strategy.
Conversely, a very small company with one type of product/line of business and therefore only one SBU can use a template where key aspects of corporate and business strategies are combined into a single, general, company strategy (See the corresponding template).
Deciding on whether or not it is beneficial to formulate some of the functional strategies for your company depends on several factors. For example, a company with its own production would benefit from formulating its own production and purchasing strategies, while essentially every type of company would benefit from implementing a marketing strategy.

Even if a company decides that it does not need to formally define some or any of the functional strategies, it can use the suggested contents of individual functional strategies as additional inspiration (framework or instructions), to
keep in mind when considering other aspects of business. If these considerations bring about significant conclusions, for example refining the current strategy, and the company still does not wish to formulate the given functional strategy, these findings can then be incorporated into the company’s business strategy in the individual Ps .
Templates for developing strategies are designed so that business and functional strategies contain sections for setting strategic objectives (i.e. WHAT we wish to achieve with the given strategy), with the remaining sections divided according to sub-sections of the given strategy, where we can indicate HOW a given strategy sub-section should be set, i.e. what measures to take to ensure objective fulfillment.
Templates for business or functional strategies can be expanded (by adding more rows) to include any number of targets that the company deems beneficial. These targets can apply to this strategy as a whole (i.e. profit development in a given SBU as a general goal of the business strategy), or they can be more detailed and apply only to a selected, or even all, strategy sub-sections (e.g. the objective “to develop and implement new rules for a unified visual style and fully adhere to them in all company aspects and with key partners”, which is, in terms of the marketing strategy, specific to the sub-section of the “Corporate Design” strategy).
Plans or measures on HOW to attain your objective should first and foremost be as SPECIFIC as possible, so that the key aspects clearly illustrate how and what the company should REALISTICALLY do in order to successfully achieve these goals. Secondly, these plans should be succinct enough so that the strategy document is simple and to the point, meaning the purpose of your strategy does not get lost in superfluous details.

Example: Objective – expand the company’s product sales from the Brno Region to Prague

HOW not defined specifically enough: launching sales in Prague
HOW defined specifically enough: establishing 1 franchise retail establishment for the company’s brand (or establishing the company’s own store in Prague etc.)

Plans for HOW are only indicated for business and functional strategies, not for corporate strategies (if the company defines it as an independent strategy). In terms of the corporate strategy, it is assumed that plans for HOW are detailed in lower level strategies, i.e. business and functional strategies. From this perspective, it is not beneficial for the company to set a corporate strategy ONLY, as it should also set a related business strategy.
Human Resources, from the perspective of individual strategies, can be set either as an independent functional HR strategy, or as a part of other strategies – in the business strategy (P – People, i.e. HR), or individual functional strategies (i.e. human resources in functional strategies for marketing, production etc. – re: individual strategic sub-sections etc.) This does not result in duplicity – an independent HR strategy can especially help larger companies set the basic strategic framework for HR in general – e.g. the company strategy in terms of remuneration, recruitment etc. In other functional strategies, the strategic sub-division of HR is dealt with specifically as a part of the given functional aspect (e.g. human resources in marketing).