Retailing 8th Edition by Patrick Dunne,Robert Lusch, James Carver

Exercise 5

Dolph Drake, the owner of Bulldog Books, has three bookstores near the campus of a large state university. In the past, he has run his stores very informally. He likes to claim that he is successful because he doesn't think too much and that he makes most of his decisions by the "seat of his pants." Over the past five years profits at each store have increased between 5 percent and 7 percent each year, despite the fact that the average price of textbooks has doubled. Also, Drake has never given much thought to changing his original plans for his bookstores.
While Drake was the first to open off-campus stores and therefore got the prime locations, competitors are beginning to appear near all three of his stores. In fact, just recently an out-of-town competitor gathered the majority of the end-of-semester textbook buy-backs, one of the most profitable activities for a campus bookstore. This out of towner merely set up a drive-through buyback operation at a nearby parking lot so that students could pull up under an awning, hand over their books, and drive off with money within minutes. Even though the competitor left town the next day, Drake expects other book buyers will seek to "hit and run" at the end of the fall semester.
As a result of this recent loss of business, Drake feels that it is time to develop a more structured approach for his business and asks you as part of your summer internship to research the strategic planning process. You are to prepare a memo on the basic steps and tasks that are involved in developing a strategic plan. Be sure to include in your memo a mission statement and a list of objectives that Bulldog Books should seek to achieve.