Strategic Planning often sounds like a big corporate thing.  Bring in consultants, sticky notes on walls, big manuals full of procedures – and forget about it until next year.  But strategic planning is really just a process of thinking through what might happen in your business future and how you might respond to those threats and opportunities when and if they emerge. According to the Center for Management and Organizational Effectiveness, there are usually 5 steps to working through a Strategic Planning process:

• Anticipate both threats and opportunities for the vision and mission of the business.
• Decide how to respond to these emerging threats and opportunities.
• Identify the source which those risks and opportunities will come from.
•  Figure out when the risks will hit or if the opportunity is truly valuable.
• Execute actions to mitigate the threats or take advantage of the opportunities.

Thus, the most important thing to do is speak with your customers, employees, vendors, investors, and study your competitors. It also helps to talk about your strategy with a partner, advisor, or trusted consultant to bring some clarity and focus to your mind around the strategic issues that could affect your business in the future.

A very good source for the questions you should be asking is 3 Good Questions.  The approach of this consulting firm is the use of Question-Based Planning™.  They believe this gives an organization focus using a plain-English alternative to traditional "strategic" planning.  There are some excellent questions for each of the functional areas in your organization.  Take a look at these ideas and then have your team start to try and answer some of them.