Upon the completion of the vision development plan building on results of the vision analysis, the entrepreneur will have also developed, to a large, extent, a corporate strategic goal, as well as the corporate growth strategy. Once developed, the Plan, however, is very confidential and must not and can not be revealed to anybody who is not an officer of the corporation. This plan must derive from the corporate growth strategy as constructed for the vision development plan.

The venture growth strategy here is essentially a more concrete definition of the strategy in its full form such as to enable a corporate-wide understanding. However, developing a strategic plan, whatever it may be, entails first the synthesis of large volumes of data followed by the analysis of the data for patterns, against which a counter strategy, effectively the Venture Growth Strategic Plan, is developed.

The performance of this task as  was with the development of the corporate strategy requires that the entrepreneur be well-versed in military strategy, however, in this case it is also required to be able to translate such strategies into business setting to be able to define the strategy within business context. Each translation of the grand strategy into a competitive strategy comes with its difficulty and advantages,  and the entrepreneur should adopt a specific one which can be readily implemented with respect to creativity of the entrepreneur.

Basis for rational translations of strategies, however, is offered by the perspective of an analogy: In a military or martial campaign, the objective is well-defined: Systematically capture the geographical region occupied by the enemy until the enemy has nowhere else to go and surrenders. Usually the geographical space has some form of economic value. So, in military campaigns the object is to dispossess the adversary of a target asset of economic value, which effectively means to obtain the sole right of deriving economic value from that assets at the expense of the adversary.

However, although in a business campaign the enemy or the competition is not being captured or forced to surrender, and there lies the disconnect, in analogy in business campaign, the object becomes to have control over the economic value of the assets [which is in this case the buying habits of the customers] to the deprivation of the competition  who also wants that control.  Systematically take  away from the competition the pool of consumers of the market of participation. So the way to think about the business-war campaign is the challenge of dispossessing the competition of the customers: The price of the battle is the customer.

On the basis of this "analogical" conceptualization of the Business campaign,  the entrepreneur must explicitly state the strategy of the competition and the counter strategy of the corporation as well as explain the competitive advantages of the Venture Growth Strategic Plan.

The strategy as defined within the context of the resources available to entrepreneur, must necessarily be documented, using a cataloguing format as shown in Table 1, for each and every prospective product of the adopted vision development path.  Of course, all such documentation should be given in terms and language of stratagem, to enable referential analysis when necessary. 

The information on the Competition Strategy addresses such issues as the strategy of each of the competitors constituting the competition, the tactics adopted by the competitor towards the implementation of the strategy, and when possible the effectiveness of the competitor strategy in terms of market share of the competitor.

The entrepreneur must explicitly state the strategy of the competition and the counter strategy of the corporation as well as explain the competitive advantages of the corporate competitive strategy, in documenting the Venture Growth Strategic Plan. The venture growth strategy here is essentially a more concrete definition of the strategy in its business campaign language or translation such as to enable a corporate-wide understanding.

The Competitive Counter-Strategy details the approach that the venture corporation has developed to make its ultimate penetration into the product market of consideration, because as with any campaign, the competition should change tactics and even strategy after the initial market entry, and as many battles constitute a war, so the entrepreneur must be disposed to engaging the competition in an endless war consisting of innumerable battles or else shut down the venture corporation. 

advertisement

Coming soon! details(in popup window)

Then, under the Effectiveness Assessment, the entrepreneur should discuss the anticipated effectiveness of the adopted counter-strategy using a form of metric by which to show the success of the corporation in terms of prospective market entry and incremental gain of market share.

In any event, the entrepreneur must develop a Grand Strategic Thrust by which the legal entity ultimately created to undertake the venture must support market participation. Effectively, the entrepreneur needs to be knowledgeable in military campaigns in order to develop the base grand strategic thrust.

Of course, to be competitive requires knowing the members of the competition, determining their definition of the product-offered with which they undertake market participation, and whenever possible their over-all business model supporting the operations of their businesses. This is by no means easy to accomplish and is ordinarily not necessarily completed before starting the business; the would-be business owner must keep this task in mind and continually gather information about the competition as well as analyze the same to discern the growth strategic plan of the competition. The information gathering, of course, must be restricted to information in the public domain. The approaches are very extensively addressed in publications dealing with competitor analysis, the business owner should invest the time to become well-versed in this art of information gathering, information analysis, and patterns and trends analysis as to decode the competitive strategies of the competition: This knowledge must then be used to out-compete the competition through the continual update and optimization of the competitive strategic plan - explained presently under Planning The Business Model.