If you scour the internet, you’ll find approximately one billion and six articles on strategy, so it can be hard to figure out what strategy is and how to set your own strategy. To put it simply, strategy is a set of activities undertaken to achieve a mission. But how do you determine what these activities should be? You can try the following method:

Establish your vision, mission, and values 

Starting here will help you make it clear where you want the organization to go. What is the change you want to see in the world? What will be your company’s role in affecting that change? What are the values that you and your team hold dear, and will not violate in the pursuit of your mission?

Perform a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis is a process by which you brainstorm your internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as your external opportunities and threats. For example, a strength might be your extensive training and experience in your chosen field, while a weakness might be a current lack of start-up capital. An opportunity could be that you’ve identified an underserved market, and a threat might be a low barrier to entry to the market for competitors. Going through this process will help determine the viable paths to fulfilling your mission.

Strategy – first draft

This is where you will come up with a preliminary list of things you will do – and crucially, what you won’t do – that will bring you closer to carrying out your mission. Defining these activities ensures that the time and resources you expend are used effectively and not wasted on things that don’t matter. For example, say that your mission is to operate a coffee shop that uses the highest quality and most sustainably produced ingredients in your area because your vision is a world where the food service industry follows these principles. Something you will do is spend more time procuring and preparing goods to make sure that quality and sustainability is maintained. Something you will not do is evaluate performance based on keeping costs low or quick inventory turnover, since these can be counterproductive to ensuring high quality.

Evaluate strategic risks

What events or facts could get in the way of carrying out this strategy? For instance, are there a limited number of vendors who provide the ingredients you need to produce high-quality coffee shop goods? Are their costs too high? In this stage, you would produce a list of these risks and plot them on a matrix with probability of occurrence on one axis and severity of impact on the other. Luckily for you, I’ve already written a previous blog post on risk matrices, so go check it out!

Revise strategy if warranted

If there are strategic risks that are difficult to overcome, you may need to make changes to your initial strategy.

Set short- and long-term goals in line with strategy

A short-term goal for our coffee shop example might be to establish relationships with a certain number of key vendors who provide the quality, sustainable ingredients you need. Meanwhile, a long-term goal might be to obtain recognition (awards, for example) from some influential body in your community for your efforts.

• Establish tactics, or day-to-day activities, that will carry out the strategy. To continue our coffee shop example, one tactic would be to create an ambience in the store that encourages a customer to be patient with their order, as opposed to an assembly-line atmosphere (i.e. Tim Hortons).

Set budgets where strategic activities are funded as needed

Smaller organizations typically are dealing with limited resources, so during your budgeting process, it’s very important that these resources are allocated only to those activities that fit the strategic plan. Otherwise, your organization might get distracted by activities that won’t bring about success.

Establishing your strategy might seem like a time-consuming endeavor, but being intentional about which activities you will and won’t do will make it far more likely that your time, effort, and capital will be used efficiently and effectively in carrying out your mission. We all get only so many chances to make a difference in the world, so take the time to be deliberate in what you do.