Business Scenarios & Strategic Investments

Your Business Transformation in 2021: Defining Your Business Scenarios and Strategic Investments

Scenario planning has never been more crucial, particularly when choosing investments within today’s hard to predict economic, political, social and public health dynamics.

In our last post and associated exercise, we worked with you to “map out” and begin sorting a range of transformative ideas and investment opportunities to catapult your business. These were aimed at helping you and your company reach transformational levels of growth. We encourage you to take a quick read through our previous post, The Discipline of Making Investments to Re-Imagine Your Business, to get that material ready for action. We are now organizing and planning your investments to factor in a range of scenarios.

What Are Your Investment Scenarios?

The most successful investments and big strategic moves factor in future scenarios and big questions.

How soon will the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out reach the communities in which my business operates?
In the next 12-18 months, how will the economy and jobs rebound or grow?
What are the big changes we foresee with respect to our customers and consumers?
What do we think our competitors will do in response to the dynamics above?

To each these questions there are multiple answers, none of us have a perfect crystal ball. It is therefore important to first map out the variables that make up your scenarios, and then apply those variables together to make up the scenarios. Also, what good would a scenario be without a great and memorable name? Below is an image of our basic template. Click here to download a complementary PDF of the template.

Steps to Creating Scenarios and Selecting Investments

Step 1: Identify Key Factors & Variables By Scenario

On the left side of the page, list the main scenario variables you see on the horizon. Dynamics in the economy? A range of potential public health outcomes? Various levels of competitive responses? The choice is yours and it’s best to use this to harness the full experience and knowledge of your leadership team.

Step 2: Pick & Name Your Three Potential Scenarios

With your variables in mind, take some time to imagine and predict how things might unfold in the coming months. These scenarios unfold almost like stories so, as any good story has a title, give yours a title or name.

Step 3: Describe Your Scenarios

In each box or bucket, spend some time describing how that variable within each scenario will come to fruition in your real world marketplace and business. Stick with us here, we will show you an actual example.

Step 4: Predict Market Share Growth

Congrats, you have detailed your scenarios and done a great job isolating the key business drivers and variables within each scenario. Is it flat? Do you have room for 5% growth? Maybe it’s 15% growth? And how will that share capture take place? Are you stealing business from the competition, or is the market size and pie growing for all participants?

Step 5: Select Investments for Each Scenario

The final step is to select which investments you will apply to each scenario. These are the opportunities and investments you mapped out in the last blog post The Discipline of Making Investments to Re-Imagine Your Business.

A Story: Regional Convenience Store Owner-Operator

Sometimes it helps to use an actual example to bring these tools and their usefulness to life. Fortunately, within the Transform community of clients and partners, we have leaders who have proven the value of these tools out in the marketplace. Below is an example of how one prominent owner of convenience stores tackled this challenge for the months and years ahead (2021 and beyond).

Now, It’s Your Turn

We’d be honored if you would take this tool for a drive with your leadership team. We know from experience that taking the time to go through this will reveal many benefits. These range from new scenarios and paths you haven’t thought of before, to the general benefits of improved communication amongst your leadership team. And of course, my team and I are always happy to discuss your work with you and share additional helpful perspective and recommendations.

Please Share! We Are Here If You Need Us!

In closing, big results do not come from singular, great ideas alone. Investment opportunities must be packaged together, and planned in the context of future scenarios and externalities. As you’ve come to learn, the methodology is both an art and a science – and most importantly it is a discipline!

Thank you for reading and I encourage you to share these tools freely with anyone you feel may find this work useful. We also encourage you to share your work back to us for feedback and guidance.

It is an honor to have you in our Transform community and I look forward to sharing our final piece from the Business Transformation in 2021 series, Impact Lab: Making Your Big Ideas a Reality.

All my best,

Julie LaNasa

Founder – Collaborative Consulting

Other posts in the Business Transformation series: