By: Bob Viering, Senior Consultant and Director of Lending
Young & Associates, Inc. is a leader in assisting financial institutions to move successfully through the strategic planning process. We remain flexible to your bank’s specific needs, and work with you to create a vision with a focus on both your short- and long-term future.
Pre-Planning – Where are We Today?
At Young & Associates, Inc., our approach to strategic planning is individualized for your bank. Prior to your planning session, we feel it is important to get to know your bank. We do this by sitting down with your management team, discussing the biggest issues facing your organization, and reviewing your results and progress from your prior strategic plan. Next we send out a confidential questionnaire to both directors and senior officers to determine if there are specific issues of importance that need to be addressed. Based on your assessment of your bank’s direction and the results of the questionnaire, we will work with you to craft an agenda that is specific to your bank. The pre-planning session and analysis is geared to answering the question: where are we now?
Planning Session – Where do We Want to Be?
On the day of your planning session, we spend time discussing what is going on in the banking world and the analysis of the pre-planning work so everyone is on the same page about where we are today. This may include updating your SWOT analysis. We focus on a critical piece of the planning session, which is to answer: where do we want to be? Young & Associates will facilitate the discussion and use our years of real-world experience to help you craft a plan that reflects your vision. The goal is to have a vision of where you want your organization to be next year, in five years, or ten years down the road, and determine what it will take to get there. Strategy is about making choices about who you want to serve, how you plan to serve them, and often just as important, who you are not going to serve.
Plan Execution – How will We Get There?
The goal at the end of the day is to have an agreed direction for your bank and the strategies/goals you will use to get there. Finally, we discuss the most important item of all planning: execution. The best plan in the world won’t get you anywhere without a plan for how you will execute your plan, who is responsible for each goal you set, a timeline for completion, and periodic updates on the progress of your plan.
Written Strategic Plan
After the planning session, we will take the information about your goals and strategies and, with the assistance of your CFO, craft a financial plan that reflects your future direction. Our financial modeling tools allow us to show the impact of various “what-if” business scenarios, whether it is an alternative/stressed budget, impact of alternative strategies on the bottom line, capital, shareholder value, liquidity etc. All of the above are then included in your written strategic plan that we complete for you.
Why Young & Associates, Inc.?
Our consultants working on strategic planning are former CEOs and senior executives that were responsible for planning in their own banks so we know the realities of running your bank every day, along with the need to balance your time with executing your plan.
For more information, contact Bob Viering:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 330.422.3476.
