Small Business Strategy

Introduction

Mission Statement
Save the Date aims to revolutionize the events market, including weddings in the UK, by enhancing accessibility through live streaming. This approach will enable Save the Date to develop a competitive edge in live streaming.

Vision Statement
Our vision is to overcome the challenges of peer-to-peer live streaming over the internet, providing a seamless and unique experience for our audience. Achieving this vision will significantly boost customer satisfaction with our services.

Difference Between Mission and Vision Statement
The mission statement defines a company's purpose or reason for existence, outlining its activities and overall intentions. According to Che et al. (2011), the mission statement supports the vision by communicating direction to stakeholders such as consumers, shareholders, and employees. In contrast, the vision statement articulates what the business aims to achieve in the future, depicting a successful future state.

Objectives
During its operations, Save the Date will focus on the following objectives:

1. Progressively develop a strong and loyal customer base by persuading target customers to appreciate the live streaming approach to events.
2. Grow the firm's market share by 10%.
3. Increase the firm's sales revenue by over 25% annually.
4. Implement high-tech internet technologies to enhance live streaming.

SWOT Analysis
Save the Date's success in the live streaming events market will depend on effectively leveraging strengths and opportunities and managing weaknesses and threats from the internal and external environment. The chart below illustrates an analysis of the firm's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strengths

1. Technology: Save the Date has integrated optimal technologies to enhance its capabilities in delivering seamless live streaming of events.
2. Human capital: The firm has the necessary expertise to provide live streaming services through a peer-to-peer approach, enabling smooth live streaming by overcoming timing and continuity constraints.

Weaknesses

1. Resource challenge: Developing competitiveness in live streaming requires integrating an effective, scalable, and robust client-server model. The firm currently faces resource constraints and needs to gather capital from external sources.
2. New entrant: Save the Date is a relatively new entrant into the live streaming market, limiting its current competitiveness.

Opportunities

1. Market growth: Although live streaming of events like weddings has yet to gain a strong market presence, Save the Date has high growth potential due to the increasing consumer integration of internet technology services, such as live streaming. Midori (2013) notes that live events have become a significant trend.
2. Internet accessibility: The growth of internet technology presents an opportunity for Save the Date to offer live streaming of events. For example, the development of internet-enabled devices such as smartphones creates a unique opportunity for Save the Date to allow clients to share events beyond the physical location.

Threats

1. Competition: The firm will face intense competition from well-established live streaming companies like YouTube (Payberah et al., 2012).
2. Security: The rise in cybercrime might negatively impact the firm's ability to provide seamless and continuous live streaming of events (Britton, 2016).

PESTLE Analysis
Save the Date will be affected by the prevailing political, economic, social, technological, and legal environments as evaluated below.

Political and Legal Factors

1. Legal factors: The UK government has enforced laws aimed at strengthening the live streaming market through the Ministry of Sound and Streaming.
2. Licensing: The UK government has simplified the procedure for businesses to apply for an online business permit, creating growth opportunities.
3. Copyright laws: Save the Date can safeguard its business by applying for intellectual property rights such as copyrights.

Economic Factors

1. Growth of digital currency: Save the Date can generate significant revenue through live streaming. The emergence of digital currency, such as Bitcoin, presents an opportunity to generate revenue (Payberah et al., 2012).
2. Economic growth: The UK has seen remarkable economic recovery from the recession, increasing consumer purchasing power.

Social Factors

1. Consumers have appreciated live streaming as an alternative approach to accessing events, enabling them to overcome time constraints.
2. Live streaming is increasingly becoming a new trend that consumers consider to improve event distribution and access.

Environmental Factors

1. Live streaming is eco-friendly as it does not cause environmental pollution through the manufacture of compact discs.

The SWOT and PESTLE analysis indicates a high potential for Save the Date to benefit from transforming the live streaming market. Social changes, such as considering live streaming a new trend, present an opportunity to generate sustainable revenue. Additionally, integrating intellectual property will ensure that the firm's technological innovation is adequately safeguarded. However, to exploit and implement the business idea successfully, Save the Date should continuously analyze the market and monitor consumer behavior changes. The firm should also improve its weaknesses and address threats from the internal and external environments. This approach will help Save the Date deal with growing competition in the live streaming market segment.

Strategic and Tactical Planning Save the Date aims to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in the live streaming market segment by integrating effective strategic and tactical planning approaches. According to Agbola and Sumaila (2011), strategic planning involves setting long-range goals that an organization intends to pursue. Strategic planning reflects the company's direction and purpose as stipulated in the mission statement. Save the Date should focus on three main areas: the external environment, operational dimension, and firm finances. Strategic plans significantly influence the formulation of tactical plans. Armstrong (2009) defines tactical plans as actions an organization employs to achieve short-term goals. Tactical plans focus on a relatively short duration, such as one year or less, outlining commitments to achieve long-term goals through short-term efforts. Armstrong (2009) emphasizes that short-term plans ‘are concerned with what the units beneath top management must do, how they must do it, and who has the responsibility’ (p.43). Tactical plans have narrower scopes and shorter timeframes compared to strategic plans.

Ways to Monitor Staff Performance To gain competitiveness, Save the Date will maximize workforce productivity by evaluating and monitoring employees’ performance. The management team will integrate effective strategic management practices and techniques, including performance appraisals, to review employee performance. Performance appraisal forms should consider the following aspects:

1. General information: Assess the employee's suitability, including technical job knowledge, customer service approach, decision-making capability, attendance and punctuality, commitment, and performance integrity.
2. Professional and supervisory skills: Assess the employee's competence level, teamwork and team-building capability, accuracy in executing assigned roles, and readiness to accept responsibilities.
3. Setting targets: Set specific job targets and milestones for employees to achieve, such as outcomes, service quality, and timeliness.
4. Performance category: Establish a rating scale for assessing different performance categories, such as grades or marks.

Balanced Scorecard The firm should integrate a balanced scorecard to evaluate individual performance levels. The balanced scorecard aims to clarify organizational strategy and vision, creating a higher understanding of corporate issues among lower-level employees. Consequently, employees understand what needs to be done to promote performance breakthroughs.

Planning and Improvement of Business Performance By integrating tactical and strategic planning, Save the Date will develop competitiveness in the live streaming market. Planning will improve small business performance by ensuring a focus on achieving short-term and long-term goals.

References

Agbola, R., & Sumaila, A. (2011). The effectiveness of performance appraisal as a tool for enhancing employee performance in the public health sector. Global Management Journal, 3(4).

Armstrong, M. (2009). Armstrong’s handbook of performance management: An evidence-based guide. Kogan Page, New York.

Britton, K. (2016). Handling privacy and security in the Internet of Things. Journal of Internet Law, 3(2), 1-8.

Che, J., Duan, Y., Zhang, T., & Fan, J. (2011). Study on the security models and strategies of cloud computing. Science Direct, 23, 586-593.

Midori, C. (2013). Technology and applications; live streaming for events; opportunity beyond the stage.

Payberah, A., Dowling, J., Rahimian, F., & Haridi, S. (2012). Distributed optimization of P2P live streaming overlays. Computing, 94, 621-647.