Do you have a strategic plan in place for the growth of your business?
If so, good for you! (If not, you might want to check out this blog post).
Strategic planning is crucial to growth no matter what industry you are in; but for the tax industry and all of the changes we’ve been faced with it is even more important. For the sake of this article let’s assume you have a strategic plan. You know where you’re going, you’ve outlined how you will grow, but now what? How do you implement your strategic plan?
One great way is to perform a Balanced Scorecard.
What Is A Balanced Scorecard?
A Balanced Scorecard helps you align your business activities to the vision and strategy of your organization. It can also help to improve your internal and external communications, and monitor your performance against strategic goals.
Simply put, a Balanced Scorecard takes your strategic plan and transforms it into your daily “marching orders”.
The Balanced Scorecard was developed by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton. The basic principle is that you view your organization from four perspectives. From each of the four perspectives (financial, customer, learning/growth, and internal process), you develop metrics, collect data and analyze.
Performing a Balanced Scorecard
Starting with your company Mission and Vision (which should be clearly stated in your strategic plan), you need to ask the following questions:
Financial Perspective: To succeed financially, how should we appear to our shareholders?
Customer Perspective: To achieve our vision, how should we appear to our customers?
Process Perspective: To satisfy our customers and shareholders, what business processes must we excel at?
Learning/Growth Perspective: To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?
For each of these four questions on your Score Card, you need to determine the following:
- Objectives
- Measures
- Targets
- Initiatives
Creating a Scorecard communicates how you plan to get from where you are currently as a company to where you want to be (your vision).
More Great Reads:
Why Every Tax Business Owner Needs a Strategic Plan
Adopting a Servant Leadership Model For Your Tax Business
Expanding Your Target Market with Continuing Education