In this age of rapid economic and political changes, one may wonder whether having a strategy is even necessary. There are several new business owners who believe that thinking on their feet, responding to day to day situations, grabbing opportunities as and when they arise and dousing fires if any, is the way to conduct business. They even go the extent of believing that strategy is a concept of the past and that it actually restricts the business from being flexible enough to make the best of all opportunities. These naysayers feel that attempting to define an uncertain future could be a waste of time at best and a loss of business at worst.

However, most of this skepticism about the usefulness of strategy has happened because of a lot of misconceptions around the term strategy. Strategy is an integrated and outward focused framework of how a business will achieve its objectives. It is not to be confused with the mission, vision or objectives of the company. It should also not be used to refer to internal elements of the organization such as policies and processes which are supposed to aid in streamlining the operations of the business in line with its strategy. However, today the term is often used loosely to mean a lot of things – you talk about a market strategy, an outsourcing strategy, a customer strategy, and often even an employee strategy. This is not to say that a strategy cannot have different pieces, but that all pieces should interlink with each other to form a cohesive whole.

If you are marketing via PPC and print advertising today, what emerging technologies should you prepare for in the future? Should you follow trends and orient yourself for better ROI via Twitter and Facebook advertising? If you are outsourcing, should you pursue call center outsourcing and outsource everything or just after hours calls? If you are focused on your customers, are you willing to loser your price points to stay competitive? If you are focused on your employees, are you exploring perks and incentives to keep your staff loving your company and wanting to work because they have a vested interest in your success?

While earlier businesses used to formulate strategies keeping in mind a long term horizon, today it makes sense to have a strategy for the next 2-3 years. This is especially true for rapidly evolving businesses such as retail or web based businesses.

You should also remember that a strategy need not be set in stone – it can and must evolve with the changing business realities. Your strategy should also have enough flexibility in areas of your business where that is needed. However, you must take care not to do everything for everybody or else you risk the danger of sharing the fate of a rudderless ship on a turbulent sea.

Again, having a strategy alone is not sufficient. You should have a sound strategy that acts as a guiding light for your day to day business operations and decision making. Business literature is rife with various analytical tools that can help you with formulating your strategy. Once you create a strategy using these tools, is there a mechanism to evaluate whether what you created is right for you? While using good tools during the strategy design phase will go a long way in ensuring that you have a robust strategy in place, it is a good idea to evaluate the output of your strategy design for fitness with your business objectives and environmental realities. Well, here is a list of questions that you can ask yourselves while evaluating your strategy document.

1. Does your strategy align with your business environment?
2. Is there a potential for healthy business growth and profit margins by adhering to your strategy?
3. Does your strategy take advantage of your core internal strengths – unique skills of your people, key advantages of your products etc.?
4. Is your strategy giving you a competitive advantage in the marketplace? How sustainable is the competitive advantage? Is it easily replicable by competition?
5. Are the various parts of your strategy consistent and complementing each other?
6. Are there any challenges in implementing and operationalizing your strategy? Do you have the organizational bandwidth in terms of funding, and personnel to pursue your strategy?
7. Are there any difficult changes necessary to align your business to your new strategy?
8. Is the time frame for which your strategy is designed ideal? Too less a time means that you would keep changing course often and will not give enough time for your operations to implement the strategy and reap its benefits. On the other hand, if your strategy has a really long time horizon, then you run the risk of not being in tune with the changing business realities around you.

Once you have verified your strategy against these questions, you can be reasonably sure that your strategy is a robust one.

This guest post has been provided by Nicolas D’Alleva. Nicolas is a Philadelphia website designer and blogger with Spotted Frog Design. For more useful business blogs, check out his websites.