- The renowned military commander Clausewitz said: “No tactical success can compensate for strategic failures.” And this means that any business without a strategic plan is doomed ☹️
- However, just having a strategic plan in your head, on a napkin, or in Excel is as good as not having one at all! Because other employees won’t use it or align their daily actions with it.
- Therefore, special platforms are needed for managing plans. At the very least, you should use such platforms yourself. But you can also create such a platform for others!
- Considering that the market for strategic planning platforms is expected to grow by more than 3 times to $5.5 billion soon, this is a rather promising niche. And to avoid reinventing the wheel, it’s better to look at existing examples of such platforms:
Project Essence
Elate is a platform for company work planning that combines setting strategic goals and tracking the daily steps towards achieving them.
It’s a genuinely working tool as it includes all necessary stages:
drafting a plan, monitoring its implementation progress, evaluating results and revising the previous version of the plan.
The planning process starts with defining strategic goals — which can be discussed, commented on, supplemented, and changed directly on the platform with other participants admitted to the strategy formulation process.
The purpose of this stage is to have all participants vote to approve the plan thus compiled.
During the planning process, it’s very common for the eyes to wander due to the number of possible goals that one would like to achieve. Therefore, the platform warns when individual teams are burdened with too many goals — because they won’t be able to achieve them all, even if they stretch themselves thin.
Once the strategic plan is approved “from the top,” it rolls out across the entire company, and each department and division on the platform develops its plan of specific actions to achieve the set goals.
The results of these actions can be automatically added to the platform through integrations with relevant corporate platforms. The platform will automatically send reminders to employees responsible for each stage of plan execution if any results are missed or fall below the planned targets.
In addition to such reminders, you can always see the progress of plan execution in a special section of the platform — where completion percentages and current indicators are indicated.
The same statistics can be viewed broken down by departments and divisions — to understand who exactly is slowing down the overall progress.
A plan is not a dogma but a working tool. Therefore, the results of its implementation need to be periodically reviewed, analyzed, conclusions drawn, and if necessary, revised.
On the platform, you can set the frequency with which such analyses should be carried out in different departments and at the company level as a whole. And then the platform will regularly send reminders to relevant employees that it’s time to analyze and update the current plan — and this task will be at the same priority level as tasks related to the initial plan execution.
Currently, Elate has raised $3.2 million in investments, increasing the total project investment to $9.4 million.
What’s interesting
Platforms for project management are a common thing known to everyone. Platforms for strategic planning, however, are less known. And it’s a real pity ☹️ because “projects” are, after all, tactics. As the famous military leader Clausewitz once said: “No tactical success can compensate for strategic failures.”
If there’s no vision, understanding, and transparency of the strategic plan, managing individual projects sooner or later degenerates into a set of ritual actions based on the principle of “can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Considering that no real serious project is ever completed on time, within budget, and with the desired quality, each project needs to be regularly reviewed. But how can tasks and project content be reviewed if one doesn’t understand which strategic goal this project is tied to?
Therefore, the overall structure of Elate is very correct:
Because it first sequentially descends from top to bottom — from strategic goals to the sequence of specific actions to achieve them (projects). And then it ascends just as sequentially from bottom to top — from the analysis and possible revision of projects to the goals for which these projects are initiated.
Despite its relative obscurity, the market for strategic planning platforms is not that small. In 2023, its size was estimated at $1.5 billion, and by 2030, it is expected to grow to $5.5 billion.
In principle, the lower threshold for the market size that startups should pay attention to is $1 billion. The market for strategic planning platforms has already surpassed this threshold, so it’s quite worthy of attention already 😉
Interestingly, within the emerging market growth, other startups with platforms for strategic planning have started receiving investments lately.
Last summer, I wrote about the startup Panobi, which raised $10 million in investments. They created a platform where you can plan and monitor the growth of products released by the company. Their main feature is the connection of product growth plans with real metrics that reflect this growth.
Last fall, I wrote about the startup Ignition, which also helps companies launch and grow their products. Their feature is that they use AI to analyze user feedback on the product and products of competitors to help create a “roadmap” for the development of their own product. They raised $8 million in investments in the very first round.
In December of last year, I wrote about the startup ProperPlan. It makes a platform for small businesses where individual entrepreneurs and small companies can develop development plans for themselves. The platform’s AI assistant needs to be informed of the desired goal and available resources — and it will automatically generate a sequence of specific actions that, when completed, can lead from the current state to the set goal. This startup has raised only £300,000 in investments so far, as their platform is set to be released only in May of this year.
Where to Run
The mentioned Ignition and ProperPlan have already started using AI technologies in their platforms. This significantly simplifies the process of creating and even monitoring plan execution — which can give an additional boost to the demand for such platforms, as they will be easier and simpler to use.
Against the backdrop of the fact that the market for strategic planning platforms is already quite large even with the current level of intelligence, there is a chance that it may grow even stronger than currently anticipated — if a greater number of companies start using simpler and more efficient planning platforms.
And this means that a possible direction of movement is the creation of strategic planning platforms that can become “simpler and more efficient” through the use of AI technologies.
The target market in this case is probably small and medium-sized businesses, as there are many such companies, and this market could potentially grow significantly.
The whole question is how exactly the strategic planning platform should be structured so that your acquaintance startup founder Vasya Pupkin or small business owner Masha Ivanova would want to use it.
Perhaps, the best way to start is from yourself 😉 That is, start creating such a platform for your own business. And if it starts working for you the way you need it to — start offering it to other Vasya Pupkins and Masha Ivanovas.
How is your planning process going right now? And the control of plan execution? And their review? What makes these processes inconvenient? What takes too much time? What is missing to make these processes more efficient and useful? What can be automated here? How and where can AI be integrated for this?
About the Company
Elate
Website: goelate.com
Last Round: $3.2M, 02.04.2024
Total Investments: $9.4M, Rounds: 4