As finance leaders, we are always looking for ways to help our businesses grow. But in order to grow, we need to have a clear strategy in place. Without a strategy, it’s difficult to set goals and measure progress. And without communication, it’s impossible to get everyone on the same page. That’s where strategy software comes in. Strategy software helps you document your strategy and communicate it effectively to everyone involved. In this episode Tom Ricca-McCarthy, Co-Founder at Lucidity joins Kevin Appleby. We talk about how to build an effective strategy and how the Lucidity software app can support you in documenting and communicating the strategy.

There are many benefits of using strategy software. Perhaps the most important benefit is that it helps you document your strategy. This is crucial because a documented strategy gives you a roadmap to follow as you execute your growth plans. It also allows you to track your progress and make changes as needed.

Another important benefit of strategy software is that it helps you communicate your strategy effectively. This is essential because, without communication, it’s impossible to get everyone on the same page. Strategy software makes it easy to share your strategy with your team or stakeholders and get their feedback. This way, you can ensure that everyone is on board with your growth plans.

Tom relates the story of needing to present the strategy for his own business and everything he needed was scattered across a whole collection of slide decks, spreadsheets and word documents. Lucidity was born out of the need to have a single place to document and then communicate everything to do with the strategic plan.

GrowCFO is running quarterly strategy bootcamps. In a series of workshops over the course of a week we help you get to grips with building a strategy for your business and documenting it using Lucidity. There’s a link below if you want to find out more.

01:23 About Tom Ricca-McCarthy

02:50 Putting a turnaround strategy in place in one of his former companies

04:12 The idea for Lucidity

05:44 Strategy is a broad activity using lots of different tools

08:30 Why you need everything in one place

10:18 SWOT, PESTLE, 5 Forces scattered across multiple documents

14:07 Its not just the analysis, it’s about executing the plan too

14:31 Tracking the KPIs and milestones

16:30 Scenario planning

17:45 GrowCFO strategy bootcamp

23:17 The CFO strategy survey

25:30 The communication challenge

28:23 Stop Start Continue

30:06 A single source of the truth

34:21 What’s next for Tom and Lucidity?

38:30 A balanced set of objectives and OKRs

44:48 The strategy execution gap