I believe most banks are sitting on a gold mine of untapped potential for organic growth and increased profits. 

In this blog, you’ll discover how you can get far more and more predictable profit and growth impact from your strategic planning process.

After reviewing over 500 strategic plans, I find that many banks lack effective strategies, lack intentional congruence, and essentially have a list of goals, but lack an effective way to get there.

If you’re the kind of leader who:

• Hires a brilliant facilitator who comes out with a well-written plan that sounds good but doesn’t ever really shake the ground from under your feet for a transformative profit surge…
• Is happy with your plan, and you’re doing well, but you wonder if you could be enjoying even better results…
• Is frustrated that you spend a pot load of money on the offsite facilitator, and it just never gives you the breakthrough strategies that, within weeks, could power up your trajectory for decades…

…You’re going to love this!

Here are the typical challenges that may be keeping you from an even better year:

Challenge 1:

Most banks have a strategic planning book with a plethora of goals. What’s missing are at least 25 different actual strategies that will bring earth-moving changes that get you paid more for doing business with the most desirable prospects in your market. 

In fact, in looking at hundreds of plans over the years, I can honestly say that I’ve not seen more than five total strategies combined in all of the plans. That’s right on hundreds of plans, only a total of five. Also, most plans lack intentional congruence. 

Challenge 2:

The big hairy audacious goal or BHAG is not congruent with the psychographics and firmographics of the top two to three target markets, and the key initiatives are a disjointed list of to-dos. There is no alignment. Additionally, the plan doesn’t usually account for an extremely relevant fact.

If you are a normal bank, only 13% of customers are profitable. The problem is it doesn’t have a solid and proven strategy to get more profitable customers just like them and get all the business of that 13% at extreme premium pricing. So even if the plan is executed well, it still puts the franchise value at risk. 

Every bank seems to be facing these same problems. 

Thousands of strategic plans are lackluster and ineffective without exception. Let’s talk about strategic plans that actually work at bringing in your most profitable prospects and making them your best customers.

There Are Just Four Simple Steps You Need to Take and See Positive Results in a Few Weeks

Step 1: Align the Plan to the Most Profitable Customers and Prospects 

Unlike so many strategic planning processes, you must start with understanding the psychographic and firmographic similarities of your top 100 most profitable customers. Then, to make sure your plan is about profit and not about busywork. Ensure that you’ve based the entire thing over no more than three integrated psychographic/firmographic intersections of that group. 

Step 2: Forget the Old Models 

Forget everything you learned about strategic planning in school. The old model of mission statements, SWOTS, and goals are ridiculously antiquated. We live in a world of disruption where non-bank vendors are vultures ready to eat the lunch of banks who still think a yearly strategic planning process is enough to drive growth and profitability. Heaven forbid if you are a bank that is doing the “we do strategic planning every two years” approach. Have you ever seen a top 10% performing bank do that? Me neither.

Step 3: Create Intentional Congruence in a One-Page Plan 

Move to a one -page strategic planning process, but don’t think because it’s brief that it’s easy or quick. If you do it right, it will be 10 times harder, but then you’ll work 100 times smarter all year. You’re packing a lot of punch in that one page with an extreme focus on the few things that matter. Make sure there is intentional congruence so that all of the elements of the plant are working together for an immediate profit boost. 

Step 4: Create Visible Alignment of Every Person to Profit 

Get everything and everyone on a visible accountability system so that every team member in your organization knows what they need to do every week to align with profit.

Put a strategic plan into place using these elements, and you can relax and know that your plan will be implemented. You will get people away from being busy to being profit-oriented, which dramatically contributes to your bank’s bottom line.