One of the most overlooked but valuable business activities is strategic planning.

That may sound counter-intuitive since most would agree that careful planning of any complicated activity would yield better results than a reactive, haphazard course of action.

Why is it then, that so many of us approach our daily business activities as a never-ending reaction to our customers and our market conditions as they exist in the moment? There is no one answer, but rather a long list of reasons that usually revolve around time.

In difficult times like these, most of us tend to think short term. Many businesses are in survival mode and their thinking is geared toward just staying in business. The idea of thinking strategically about five years or even one year from now just doesn’t seem important, even though at some level, we all know that it is.

So, what is the value of developing a one, three and five year strategic plan when we are currently in the midst of an economic downturn?

Answer: paradoxically, it may be the one thing that will ensure survival because it makes us stop and think about how we do business, how our competitors do business and whether or not our actions support defined goals and objectives that increase our chance for success.

When we think strategically the creative and competitive juices begin to flow again. We begin to look at our businesses once again as paths to success rather than means of survival. We go back on offense and find ourselves with new ideas, new energy and new ways to make money.

There’s another paradox in the mix as well. I train commercial real estate professionals for a living. Now, most of us know that selling and leasing commercial property today is a difficult thing to do. Demand has lagged supply to the point of record vacancies and the value of commercial real estate has dropped accordingly, and in no small way. Hitting the streets to find new deals every day can be quite difficult, as you might imagine. Those I coach come to me a bit beat up at times, and my advice to them is to think to the future.

Don’t measure success by what “opportunities” you found today, but by what relationships and opportunities you build for tomorrow.

With year end fast approaching, now is the time to start business planning for 2010 and beyond and taking a strategic look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that impact your business. This will enable you to formulate a powerful business plan for success in 2010 as the economy climbs out of recession and give you the best shot of emerging ahead of the competition.

There are many facets to successful business planning, real estate being a very significant yet far too often overlooked one. With real estate being a business’s second largest overhead after payroll, the importance of strategic real estate planning can’t be overlooked. This is particularly the case considering the current commercial real estate climate and the multitude of opportunities that exist for companies to realign their corporate real estate with their business plan on the most cost-effective terms we’ve seen for years.

Unfortunately, most executives ignore their real estate until they are forced to address it. This, of course, is too late and usually results in rushed decision making that creates risk and unnecessary costs for a business, an inefficient use of company time and missed opportunities to actually leverage your real estate to springboard corporate growth rather than drag it down.

Stefan Rogers of Voit’s Commercial Tenant Solutions team recently wrote a great article on the importance of strategic real estate planning. You can read it HERE and contact him at 949.263.5362 for advice on how to create an effective real estate strategy for your business.

Russ Johnson of RJ Consulting, Inc, is a training and marketing consultant to Voit Real Estate Services. He began his commercial real estate career in 1977. For 26 years he managed commercial real estate brokerage operations and has been involved in thousands of lease and sale transactions through all phases of the real estate cycle.

Tags: brokerage, business, commercial, corporate, cost, deals, economic, economy, estate, growth, lease, manage, market, money, overhead, planning, professional, property, Real, Real Estate, recession, rent, risk, rogers, russ johnson, sale, sell, services, solutions, strategic, Tenant, time, transaction, value, voit

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Corporate Real Estate Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.