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Get on the Road to Success in 2025 With a Strategic Roadmap

Where do you want your business to go this year? Meet your growth goals and avoid all the potholes and detours along the way with a strategic roadmap.

Written by: John O'Hara
Originally Published: 27 January 2025
Last Modified: 27 January 2025

These days, we take the value of a roadmap for granted. Before Google Maps, your options were limited if you wanted to get through a part of the country you weren’t familiar with. You could get directions from someone who had made the trip before. If you were traveling in the 21st century, you could print out directions from MapQuest. You could buy a map at a gas station. You could just get on the highway and follow the signs.

A combination of these methods would probably get you where you wanted to go, but it wasn’t always smooth sailing…er, driving. Both paper and online maps weren’t always up to date, and you couldn’t always rely on someone else’s memory of a particular route. On top of that, that paper map couldn’t warn you about traffic, construction, the weather, accidents, or if half of downtown is shut down for a racing event.

Why You Need a Strategic Roadmap

Many of us still plan our businesses the way we planned our road trips in the 90s—which is to say, minimally. We just get on the road and follow the signs, so to speak, maybe ask for directions, maybe not. We might follow a route to growth someone else mapped out, but without accounting for how the two businesses differ.

If you want to stand out in a crowd, find the people who are going to be your most loyal customers, and grow sustainably, you need a better plan than the equivalent of “drive until we get lost and then ask.” You need a Google Maps for business (or Apple Maps, or Waze, if you prefer) that can anticipate possible problems, offer multiple routes, give you an accurate ETA, help you reroute when unforeseen circumstances arise, and, of course, show you the location of every Krispy Kreme en route.

Every business has goals. A roadmap shows you exactly what the path to achieving your goals looks like. I have a goal: reach New York City. I have a strategy: get gas, hit the road, stop for lunch, get back on the road. With a strategic roadmap guiding you, everyone in the car knows where we’re going, everyone went to the bathroom before we left, and no one is asking, “are we there yet?”

Creating a Strategic Roadmap

Now that we’ve stretched the driving metaphor to its absolute limit (it’s running on fumes, one might say), let’s look at how to develop a strategic roadmap. The process involves moving from strategy to goals to action. 

First, you must define your strategy: what you sell, how you sell it, your competitive advantage, your differentiators, and the resources you have available. Competitive advantage and differentiators answer the questions, “What makes us different?” and “Why do we matter?” These questions are important for two intertwined reasons. The first is that customers need a reason to choose you over another business. The second is that who you are, how you do business, and what you stand for determines what kinds of strategies are best suited to your business.

Not every business has the same resources. If I own a helicopter, the “roadmap” for my commute is going to look much different than if I own a bicycle. I can, however, find ways to turn “only” having a bicycle into an advantage by going places a helicopter cannot reach. 

If I can only get to where I need to go by helicopter, on the other hand, my strategic roadmap had better map out a way for me to acquire the services of one. The business-specific questions you might ask at this point might look like these:

  • Do we have the budget, expertise, and type of product that would benefit from an ad campaign, or are our resources best used to reach our customers through a content marketing campaign?
  • Do we have the type of business, clients, and infrastructure needed to close B2B sales through online self-service, or are we better off relying on our sales staff out in the field?

“Working with what you have” isn’t about working around limitations. It’s about playing to your strengths. If our goal is to increase margins by 10% by the end of the year, our competitive advantage and differentiators form the basis of our strategic approach. For example, you might ask yourself:

  • Can we find a way to reduce manufacturing costs?
  • Do we build an identity around our superior customer service and attract customers that way?
  • Should we focus on our commitment to responsibility and sustainability and market to consumers with similar values? 
  • Do we focus on our superior quality and offer a luxury experience at a premium price?

The key is to find the three or four areas in which you know you can compete and rank them. The area in which you know you can excel becomes your primary strategy, with the others supporting that one.

At the same time, you don’t want to limit yourself out of fear. “I don’t own a fishing rod” is not a good reason to not go fishing if catching fish is what you need to do. You build “acquire fishing rod” or “hire a pro angler” into your business plan, and you develop a roadmap that helps you achieve those goals.

So you know what your business is all about, the goals you want to reach, and how you’re going to achieve those goals. You are now also able to articulate the competitive advantage that will become the focus of your strategy, whether that’s a superior product, superior operations, or superior customer service.

It would be a mistake to see operations, sales, and marketing as separate departments pursuing these goals in their own ways. A strategic roadmap should have every department pulling in the same direction, with their goals not separate goals devised in isolation, but supporting the main goal.

Everything becomes clearer when each department works to achieve clearly articulated strategic goals. You’ll see where you have to increase capacity, develop more efficient processes, hire and train new talent, and so on. Your strategic roadmap will then break down the big goal into projects, with project plans, checklists, and timelines for completion.

Bring Your Destination into Focus

A strategic roadmap begins with a simple question: where do you want to go? It then moves on to answer a more complex one: how are we going to get there? Clearly stated goals are the foundation on which you build a strong strategy. When you know where you’re going and how you can get there, everything else falls into place.

Are You Ready to Do Better Growth Management?

StrategyWerx is all about growth strategy and management. That means giving you the tools you need to develop sound strategies, structure your organization to lay the track ahead of the train, and implement the tools you need to grow. Ready to learn more about how we do that? Book a free consult and bring your questions. See if you like working with us on our dime, and get some good advice in the process.