Develop a plan
McDonald and the Service Brands leadership team began the strategic planning process at the brand level for a couple of reasons. First, the company’s brands are its public face, its customer interface and essentially the lifeblood of the whole process. If each brand didn’t get what it needed out of a strategic plan, Service Brands’ long-term health could not be assured.
The second reason is more general and applicable across all types of businesses: Employees want to feel engaged in defining their company’s future.
Once all parties under the corporate umbrella developed their specific strategies, McDonald then assisted in ramping those strategies to a larger corporate strategic vision that would provide longer-term direction for everyone in the organization.
“We were very methodical in how we did it,” McDonald says. “We took a lot of time, had a lot of people involved, and then at the end of the year, we presented our overall strategy to the board for final approval. Then we rolled it out to all our employees.”
Even though the strategy started at the brand level, the initial plan for strategy creation needed to start at the top. McDonald and the company’s leadership team met and began to draw a basic road map for proceeding through the treacherous economic climate. In the early fall of last year, the company leaders decided to drive the strategy formation process down to the individual brands.
“One of the brands would get together with their people, I would attend, and some members of the executive team would attend,” McDonald says. “For several days, we followed this very tight methodology process to make it happen. We identified that if we are going to be successful for the next one, two and three years, what do we need to do and how can we maximize our investment on both a human and financial basis?”
During the process, McDonald and the other corporate executives in attendance worked as equal participants with the brand presidents, who ran the meetings. By taking that approach, the company’s corporate leaders took an early step in creating ownership of the strategy among the company’s brand-level management and franchisees.
Once the president of each brand under the Service Brands umbrella had conducted their strategic planning workshop, McDonald and his leadership team took the strategic needs and requests from each brand and developed a master list, which they then took to Service Brands’ corporate-level support staff.
“We developed a list of what we needed from technology, what we needed from marketing, what we needed from legal and finance, and so on,” he says. “Then we went to each of our support functions and told them exactly that: ‘This is what we need from you in order for our brands to be successful.’ The support function leaders then met with their teams and came up with their own business plans, which were essentially their strategies for dealing with this.”
Once the support staff teams reported back to upper management with their plans — including costs, projected returns, resources needed and measurement methods — McDonald’s team then pieced all the brand-level and support-level work together to form Service Brands’ overarching strategy.
“It was really nothing more than a rollup of all the brand strategies,” McDonald says. “There is no point in trying to have alignment if the corporate strategy is something completely different from what the brands are trying to accomplish. You need to have alignment and unification if you have strategies at different levels of the organization. At the end of all of the planning, what we have now is that every person in the organization is aware of not only what we want to do from an overall organizational standpoint but also from the perspective of each of our brands and support functions. Everyone understands that our goal is to make our franchisees as successful as possible.”
McDonald says any good strategic planning process is rooted in good communication. If there is an overall lesson to be learned from his experience, he says it is to communicate constantly during the planning process.
“It’s the frequency, it’s the detail, all of those things,” he says. “People need to realize where you’re trying to go as an organization, and they need to know when you’ve arrived. That is an ongoing process, both during and after the strategic planning process. You can communicate the direction of the company in many ways and solicit feedback in many ways, but just like anything else in business, it should be a part of a planned strategy.”
