Are business plans and strategic plans basically the same thing?

Strategic plans are part of the business plan.

A business plan can have many components, but most have:

executive summary
Market Analysis
Company Description
Organization & Management
Marketing & Sales Management
Service or Product Line
Funding Request
Financial Projections
Appendix

Think of strategy as your overall approach to business. While the business plan is what you are going to do to achieve the strategy, based on the environment - market analysis, competitive analysis...

This is a great question!
"Business Plans" is a term with a different definition depending on who you talk to. To some, it's the umbrella covering all other levels of planning (as Wayne indicated). To others, it's how the strategy will be executed (as Regis answered). In conglomerates, the "business plans" may be the subsidiaries' plans. For start-up or smaller companies, it's a structured document used to raise funds. So its easy to see why this can cause confusion.

In some companies, they avoid the term completely to head off confusion. Maybe the oldest and most common structure is:
-- Strategic Plans: High level statements of direction. For example: Expanding into certain geographies or product lines, becoming the innovation leader or the nimble second-mover, etc.
-- Tactical Plans: More specific ideas of how the strategy will be executed, describing how resources will be deployed. For example: Building a physical presence in the new geography versus shipping to that geography, big investments in IT to better serve customers, marketing strategies, etc.
-- Operating Plans (sometimes Logistical Plans): These are the most specific details for running things on a daily/monthly basis.

There's no wrong definition. What's most important is that everyone in the company uses the same terms & definitions. If you don't, people are likely to do the wrong things... or nothing at all due to uncertainty.

Ditto on the above, with a perspective of:
-Business Plan: the structure you use to generate Operational Plans
-Strategic Plan: Creates the structure for business / operational plans
...and...
Time windows are often used to discriminate between them. In a startup environment, anything outside of 3 months is potentially fanciful, but you want to know that if things work out, there is money to be made. The business plan looks out past the operational planning window; you don't *believe* that your plan beyond 6 months will really happen...but it is an important framework for what you do now operationally (both for now and the potential futures), and sets up your operational planning process for when you get to the next implementation point.
The strategic plan goes even further, and addresses issues that aren't necessarily financially quantifiable; market threats, technology changes, etc. At Intel the strategic plan was critical for us in planning what the broader ecosystem could look like. We could not control it, but we could (and did) plan for potential futures, watch for influencing trends, and try to effect positive changes. In a larger business like that, the strategic plans were *topical*, addressing certain trends and market segments. These would feed business unit owners information both on what we thought was going on and what the larger company was trying to do in that context.

Piggy backing on the earlier comments, both of my long term employers used a three year horizon, by quarter, for the strategic plan, especially for new market penetration. The business and operational plans were updated annually for budget purposes.

I have a slightly different take on this question based on my definition of strategy in a corporate context. 'Strategy' is one of those words that everyone uses yet very few professionals have a common definition of. Most professionals' definition of strategy is the same as business planning which is why you often see people confuse marketing strategies with corporate strategy planning. The definition I prefer is that Corporate Strategic Planning involves the development and enhancements of key competitive assets that enable you to serve your customer more profitably while gaining market share. A key competitive asset is defined as those things which are valuable to the delivery of your offering and are hard for competitors to duplicate.

Using this perspective, time horizon is not the key strategic pivot. Time horizons are good for thinking about two dynamics that typically govern market entry: first, when a new market trend will grow to be attractive enough to be investable, and second, when your organization will be ready to capitalize on a new trend. Sometimes those are independent factors. For instance, you can have an existing market that is already large enough for investment, but your company doesn't yet have the appropriate assets to serve it competitively and vice-versa. Horizons are a nice way to think about timing, but are secondary to a more fundamental question.

The foundation of strategic planning is asking yourself whether you have the right set of sufficient key competitive assets that will enable you to capture customers and market share in segment that you believe has inherent growth and profitability characteristics. Key assets are a combination of your company's capabilities that your customers or future customers desire and will be hard to duplicate by competitors. This can include such things as a well-known brand, superior customer service, lower cost of goods, more efficient product development cycles, patents, high quality goods or services, more effective supply chain, among other things. As a side note, I define marketing strategy as the plan for taking a company's limited marketing budget and capturing the most customers based on the company's current competitive assets, target customers' preferences and modern marketing methodologies.

So using this context, the difference between a strategic plan and a business plan is straight-forward in my opinion. A strategic plan outlines how an organization will create or enhance existing or new strategic assets that will enable it to more effectively address its current or new markets. A business plan typically outlines how a company will execute a strategic plan over a defined period of time and focuses on the tactics to to create the key assets. For example, a strategic plan may be for a company to enter a certain market because of changes in society and its adjacency to the company's current business. It will contain analysis of why the target market is attractive (size, growth, drivers of the change in the market, customer problem statement/pain being addressed) and an overview of the ideal way to address that market. Then it should compare the current state of the company's strategic assets relevant to the target market and make recommendations on organizational changes required to get closer to the ideal state. Lastly, the strategic plan will outline a financial analysis that demonstrates that a company will earn a return on investment from the effort. A business plan typically follows from this and provides details on the tactical implementation of strategic plan: hiring plans, operating expense plans, IT change requirements, etc... The business plan's details should fit within the larger framework that the strategic plan provides.

Clearly, there can be significant overlap between the two concepts and if the business is large and doesn't require significant strategic change, then the business plan may largely contain the strategic plan. If you are a startup with little current strategic assets, then building those assets is the dominant concern, and your strategic plan is largely your business plan. I hope this perspective is helpful to your question.

I suggest reading the book "Good Strategy Bad Strategy - The difference and why it matters." by professor R. Rumelt ... http://goodbadstrategy.com/ ... "A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action." AS you can see, a Business Plan is completely different, but will potentially overlap in the guiding policy and coherent actions.

No. The two are different in scope, sequence, and creation.

Strategy comes before business planning.

Strategy is concerned with the external, opportunities and threats, implications for the enterprise, considerations of how resources can be directed/enhanced to implement
the direction that is decided.

Planning involves how to implement the strategy, is more internal in focus, more operational than creative in conceptualization.

Thinking the two are the same may be precarious, though many execs and therefore the company managements of which they are apart, insufficiently recognize the differences between the two and the profound implications of those differences.

Best to think, know and act the difference between these two or beware the consequences. Defining a cat as a dog does not make it bark. Difference of opinion is great but words do have definite meanings. Kudos to those above who recognize the value of thoroughly pointing that out.

While I agree that Business Plans are the structure you use to generate Operational Plans, Strategic Plans should be well documented, followed and refined from time to time just as one would a business plan. Since both operational process and strategy are factors related to positively impacting the bottom line I think they each should be considered a part of the whole plan or overall business schematic if you will.

A good differentiator would be WHERE the documents ORIGINATE FROM. Strrategic Plans are more or less molded in the Boardroom and the realm of the Board of Directors while Business Plans in/by the C Suite.