Our Approach
Let's fix a destination and plot a course.

Plans Everyone Can Get Behind

Parachute Strategies helps clients develop clear, realistic visions for their future and build the solid, internal foundation they need to make those visions a reality. We also help them plan and achieve near-term goals that bring them closer to their dreamed-of future, step by step.

Because we believe everyone in your organization has a role in making your vision a success, we take an “all hands on deck” approach to strategic planning.

  • A set of agreed objectives and a sense of common purpose
  • Outcomes that can be measured and tracked
  • Clear-cut responsibility and accountability
  • More deliberate, purposeful decision making across the organization
  • The opportunity for employees to be a part of something bigger than themselves
  • Improved esprit de corps

Our Strategic Planning Approach

At its heart, the strategic planning process answers three questions:

Where are we today?

Parachute Strategies helps answer this question through extensive interviews with an organization’s leaders, staff, and if applicable, board members. In many cases, we also interview clients, stakeholders, trusted advisers, and other people who know the organization well to get a complete sense of its place in the market. Typically using a retreat, we establish a common understanding of our current position, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Where do we want to go?

After developing a clear picture of where the organization is today, we work with leadership and staff to develop a vision of where they want the organization to be in a three- to five-year timeframe.

Questions we will answer while defining your vision could include:

  • Who will the organization serve?
  • How big will it be?
  • How will we be regarded in our market?
  • What will it feel like to work there?

With your vision for the future in place, we work with your leadership and staff to establish no more than five clear, measurable objectives for the organization to achieve within three to five years.

How will we get there?

Too often, an organization will spend thousands of dollars and untold staff hours creating a strategic plan. A year or two later, leadership will be the first to admit that the plan hasn’t been the driver of day-to-day operations, and few of their objectives have been accomplished.

A hallmark of Parachute Strategies’ strategic planning process is our commitment to helping you see your plans through. We do this via a rolling implementation process:

  • A team is assigned to each objective in the strategic plan. Teams are typically composed of leaders, staff, board members, and sometimes outside stakeholders or advisers.
  • Each team sets a one-year goal toward meeting their objective. Then they break that goal into a series of achievable action plans that are set and reported on every 90 days.

We find that this approach to strategic plan implementation provides accountability. It is also flexible enough to weather unforeseen organizational shifts or environmental changes. If you want, we will stay on the scene for the first 90 days to coach your teams as they get accustomed to this system and take some of the burden of managing the strategic plan’s implementation off of leadership.