Dust Off Your Strategy
(Wake Up – 2025 is a New Year)

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You developed a great strategic plan in 2024, and then forgot about it as you met the daily demands of your business. Did you:

• Follow your strategy?
• Satisfy your clients?
• Meet your business goals?

If you don’t know, take time now to quickly review 2024 (What worked and what didn’t?). Then, develop your 2025 strategy.

Don’t over-complicate your first cut at the 2025 plan. Consider the “tall trees” before wading in the weeds. Here’s an outline to help you strategize for 2025.

The Foundation of Your Enterprise

• What are your Lessons learned from 2024? Are any changes needed to your service? Any new ideas?
• Who are the people you hope will buy, whether they are current clients or potential clients?
• How do you know the benefits and value your service provides to clients?

Your Business Goals

• What do you hope to achieve in 2025 with your business or new idea? In other words, what are your Strategic Objectives and Measures?
• What opportunities exist to help you accomplish your goals? Will your network or the economy help?
• Who or what may stand in your way? Who is your competition? What’s special about your service? Can AI replace you?

Major Methods to Achieve Your Goals

How will you:

• Reach your customers or clients via your marketing strategy?
• Get them to buy (i.e., your selling strategy)?
• Make money via your pricing and profit strategy?

First: Build a Top-level Strategy

1. Capture your Big Picture Ideas and answer Major Questions before getting mired in the minute details of a full business plan.
2. Discover early-on whether your 2025 Strategy and benefits look like winners or “ugly babies” by interviewing potential clients.
3. Be alert for inspiration or surprises that pop up during your strategizing.

Next: Activate your 2025 Strategy with Strategic Objectives

Action Items: What, Why, Who, When, How much?

Then: At the beginning of 2025, schedule Strategy Review Sessions throughout the year, at least quarterly or more often.

1. Track your progress.
2. Adjust strategy and actions as needed.
3. Don’t let “Strategy Dust” collect in 2025.

Strategize for 2026 before the end of 2025.

Simon Vision Consulting Program Update

The Rochester Professional Consultants Network’s (RPCN) program of providing mentors to the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business (Simon) Simon Vision Consulting Program (Simon Vision) is gearing up to provide mentors for a fifteenth consecutive semester starting in late January.

For those of you that regularly read this column, you already know about Simon Vision and what a great opportunity it is. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Simon Vision, the program is an effort to increase experiential learning opportunities for Simon’s MBA and MS students.

As of this time, we aren’t sure if there will be 12 or 16 projects in the Spring semester, but we do know that we’ll need at least 12 mentors, and perhaps even 16, for the semester. The projects won’t all be based in the Rochester area although most are.

• In the Fall semester we had one client based in Warsaw Poland. Clients won’t be coming from quite as far away this time but there will be some from as far away as Minnesota.
• There’s also going to be a project where a company that has a humanitarian bent in its offerings that’s looking into a merger with another company in a complementary area. Because of that, we are looking for at least one mentor with merger experience to help that project team stay on track.  

Although the clients and projects are set for the upcoming Spring semester, it is never too early to be looking for projects and mentors for the Fall 2025 semester.

Mentors

As mentioned above, we’re already looking for mentors for the upcoming Spring semester. There will likely be 12 - 16 projects in total, so we’d like to have at least that many mentors to help.

• The mentors meet in person or virtually with their project manager and/or team anywhere from once per week to once per month, depending upon the needs of the team and the project.
• How and when you meet is in large part dictated by the needs of the student project manager and are mutually decided by you and the student project manager.

It’s fun to work with the students and you might even find yourself learning some new things. If you’d like to become a mentor, please contact me at the information shown at the end of this article.

Projects
Simon Vision is also looking for new projects for the Fall semester.

• If you, a client, or an associate have an outsourceable project that could be completed in about 8 – 10 weeks, send an application to Simon Vision to get it included in the Fall 2025 semester.
• Projects are evaluated by the Simon Vision student governing board, and the leadership of Simon Vision will collaborate with you to define the project requirements to be completed within these constraints.

Contact Information
If you are interested in having a Simon Vision Project Team perform work for you, would like more information about the program, or if you’d like to volunteer to be an RPCN member mentor to a student team, please contact Dave Bassett at dbassett@basstat.com.

—Dave Bassett

RPCN Technical Forum

Please join us on the first Friday of the month for the Tech Forum.

We are continuing to implement a new format.

• You can still get your technology-related questions answered, but we’ve begun to switch over to Our Technology Adventures shortly after 9AM. This is an opportunity for you to tell those present about the new technology that you’ve started using and all the things you find helpful about that tech gear. In January, we hoped to talk about tech related stuff you received for the holidays.
• If you can only stay for the part of the Forum when we’re discussing technology-related questions, that’s fine.
• If you can only join us for Our Technology Adventures, that’ll work too.
• We’d love to have you for the full meeting, including the time set aside until 10AM for individualized networking in our breakout rooms or at Ahren’s Benefits large meeting room.
• You can even come just for the networking, which typically starts just after 9:30AM.

Our goal for the Tech Forum is to make this program as beneficial to our members and guests as possible.

If you’ve attended any of our recent Tech Forums, we’d love to get your thoughts about its new format, the tweaks we’ve made to it, and how to build on what we’ve had in it the past 30 years. Please send them to this email: TechForum@rochesterconsultants.org.