Preparing a Business Strategy. Use the descriptions below to develop your strategy. Prepare a business strategy for your small Recreation, Event & Tourism business. You can select what type of business within the industry you would like to open. Complete a strategic plan for that business. Once completed, upload into Blackboard under the "Course Assignments" tab. Please use 12-pt font. A strategic plan, typically 2-3 pages, can provide a valuable foundation to base a more detailed and comprehensive business plan. If you don't have a sensible strategic plan, how can you realistically write a sensible business plan? Use a short strategic plan as the foundation for a more comprehensive business plan. Before you can effectively develop a strategic plan, it is essential to clearly identify the current status, objectives and strategies of an existing business or the latest thinking in respect of a new venture. Correctly defined, these can be used as the basis for a critical examination to probe existing or perceived strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. This then leads to strategy development covering the following issues which are discussed in more detail immediately below: . . Vision Mission Objectives Values Strategies Goals . . Vision The first step is to develop a genuine and realistic Vision for your business. This vision should be presented as the overall picture of the business in three or more years time in terms of its likely physical appearance, size, activities etc. Answer the question: "if someone from Europe visited the business, what would they see or sense?" Mission The nature of a business is often expressed in terms of its Mission which indicates the purposes of the business, for example, "to design, develop, manufacture and market specific product lines for sale on the basis of certain features to meet the identified needs of specified customer groups via certain distribution channels in particular geographic areas". A statement along these lines indicates what the business is about and is infinitely clearer than saying, for instance, "we're in events" or worse still, "we are in business to provide events" Sometimes people confuse mission statements with value statements (see below) - the former should be very hard-nosed while the latter can deal with 'softer' issues surrounding the business. Objectives The third key element is to explicitly state the business's Objectives in terms of the results it needs/wants to achieve in the medium/long term. Aside from presumably indicating a necessity to achieve regular profits (expressed as return on shareholders' funds), objectives should relate to the expectations and requirements of all the major stakeholders, including employees, and should reflect the underlying reasons for running the business. Values The next element is to address the Values governing the operation of the business and its conduct or relationships with society, customers, employees etc. Strategies Next are the Strategies - the rules and guidelines by which the mission, objectives etc. may be achieved. They can cover the business as a whole including such matters as diversification, organic growth, or acquisition plans, or they can relate to primary matters in key functional areas, for example: The company's internal cash flow will fund all future growth New products will progressively replace existing ones over the next 3 years. All assembly work will be contracted out to lower the company's break-even point. Goals Next are Goals. These are specific interim or ultimate time-based measurements to be achieved by implementing strategies in pursuit of the company's objectives, for example, to achieve sales of $5 million in sales within fours years