Essay Example on Flawed Strategic Plan Led to Poor Decision-Making in Business

Introduction

A strategic plan helps in the allocation of time to various tasks and proper utilization of resources (Prajogo & Brown, 2006). Hence, the lack of it led to the failure to track the right things and evaluate the benefits of particular endeavors to boost the decision-making process. This way, she could economically decide on the most beneficial strategies to prioritize. The business lacked measures for adjustments. Customers received the same service every day, and this aspect had the potential of developing boredom and leading to the shifting of some customers. With a good plan, one can track progress, remember to collect feedback from customers, introduce promotions and broaden product range (Nwankwo & Gbadamosi, 2020), and develop new delicacies to keep the customers amazed with a variety of choices with unique flavors.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The business lacked milestones. Setting milestones is essential for SMEs in tracking their progress. These comprise of the vital targets that the business needed to achieve after a specified period. These will include hiring more staff, establishing a better delivery system, among others. A lack of a clear business plan was also indicated by the absence of metrics that are reviewable weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on the respective variables. Such metrics could be sales, expenses, trips, seminars, calls, returns, conversation rates, web traffic, among others.

Recommendations

Rebecca’s initiative to enhance the quality of her supply by ensuring g that customers received food that met their expectations is one factor that kept her in business. However, she needs to do more to keep her business competitive. Though she said that she paid little attention to competitors (Gray, 2017), her strategy must be reinforced by more economically reliable recommendations.

Improvement of the Quality of Food

Food quality can be enhanced by multiple ways to attract a large customer base. One of the ways is through management commitment that is customer based. Big Foodie has some customer confidence in the delivery of a quality that matches the customers’ expectations. However, with the inevitable future expansion of the business, REBECCA will need to be committed to her staff and customers by doing the following. First, she will need to set up a quality committee that will be under her supervision. The committee will oversee all the processes of procurement of raw materials from farms, food preparation procedures in the kitchen, and safe packaging of meals before delivering to prospective customers.

Secondly, she will need to formulate and establish quality objectives and policies and ensure that her staff are well informed and work in line with the set standards. This aspect will ensure that she does not lose her original taste on food quality standards that were well known to her loyal customers. The policies will include the ingredients and quantities in certain delicacies. Additionally, some of the policies will apply to suppliers of the raw materials. For instance, the company will accept food supplies from certified farmers who use restricted and declared farm chemicals in crop protection. These policies are necessary to eliminate contaminated supplies that may affect Big Foodie’s food quality standards.

Thirdly, management will offer training to employees on customer service and essential procedures, especially the delivery and customer care teams, who engage customers directly while delivering and taking new orders, respectively (Aday & Phelan, 2015). It will enhance customer relationships hence increasing customer purchases. The fourth aspect is overseeing the implementation of these policies at all levels. It will also involve evaluating the efficiency of the policies and revising them per the evaluation results.

Establishment of a Reliable Business Plan

Developing a good business plan is essential to any startup business that is focused on growing its income. Therefore, Rebecca will need to work towards establishing a good business plan that will meet the following criteria. First, she will need to formulate a business plan that fits her business (Wakefield, 2017). She started a village kitchen business like no other in the locality, the same way she should keep her business unique and compete for her market share (Gray, 2017). Even though it is similar to many other food delivery businesses, her niche cannot be replicated.

The plan should be realistic and implementable. The plan should be that which a food processing and delivery system can be built on. A business can be well written, formatted beautifully and brilliantly written but lack the connection to the business. That way, it loses its importance in building the business idea. For instance, a million-dollar business plan that fails to present a good management team may not be profitable hence lacks applicability.

Another important aspect of the plan is specificity. That is, the plan should be precise in the following aspects. It should indicate dates for particular activities such as training and conferences. It should also specify deadlines for various tasks such as receipt of daily fresh raw material for meals to discourage timeliness in the delivery of customer orders. Budgets should be specified in percentages and ranges for particular payments, among other metrics.

Conclusion

These recommendations are towards ensuring that all aspects of the company are focused on customer satisfaction. Every business has its customers as a great resource to facilitating growth both in the short run and in the long run.

References

Aday, J. B., & Phelan, K. V. (2015). Competitive advantage or market saturation: An in-depth comparison of flash-sale sites through content analysis. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 24(3), 287-313.

Agwu, M.E & Afieroho, E. (2016). Impact of Product Quality Management on the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. European Journal of Social Sciences, 52(2), 175-190. www.europeanjournalofsocialsciences.com/

Bocken, N. M., Fil, A., & Prabhu, J. (2016). Scaling up social businesses in developing markets. Journal of Cleaner Production, 139, 295-308.

Gray, A. (2017 October). Just do it. Nzbusiness.co.nz. Pg. 10-11.

Kumar, V., Gaur, A. S., & Pattnaik, C. (2012). Product diversification and international expansion of business groups. Management International Review, 52(2), 175-192.

Prajogo, D. I. & Brown, A. (2006). Approaches to adopting quality in SMEs and the impact on quality management practices and performance. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 17(5), 555-566, doi: 10.1080/14783360600588042

Schneider, S., & Spieth, P. (2013). Business model innovation: Towards an integrated future research agenda. International Journal of Innovation Management, 17(1), 1340001.

Waldman-Brown, A., & Campbell, G.F. (2018). Economic inclusivity through networked SME production: A case study in Kenya