As I sat naked with the bank president in the steam room at our downtown YMCA, the conversation turned to strategic planning. His bank had recently hired a third-party facilitator to help lead their meetings and it was going well. They thought they knew their bank. But after the last meeting they were not so sure.
The president and his team had always view their business as an “average guy’s” bank. But after scanning through their data, they discovered a discrepancy between who they thought of as their customers and who they actually were. The data showed that their actual client was more affluent than they'd thought, but they had very little penetration of each individual’s entire banking needs.
That conversation got me to thinking about all the time our company has spent on “strategic planning.” Planning is key to the success of a business or anything else. But too often, the best-laid plans end up in a file on the network that is never reviewed or referenced. Results are rarely measured against benchmarks--unless goals are hit, in which case, the plan is brandished around like a new IPhone 6 at a coffee shop. If goals are missed, good luck finding the plan. It’s on the Z: drive under, don’t remind us how bad we are doing.
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