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Business Planning

What is our idea of EFFECTIVE Business Planning?

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  1. Understanding the place for Strategy.  Strategic Planning is the process of thinking about the available opportunities and their pros and cons.  It's only place in planning process is that you need it in place before you can begin planning.

  2. Developing a business plan that emulates the processes of others is not likely to work.  Toyota did not get to outperform General Motors by emulating GM practices; it reinvented manufacturing instead.

  3. There are two general types of business plans:

    • Plans to get money - These are plans that are written solely to influence an outside lender or investor that you have the great idea and they should send their money to you.​

    • Plans to make money - These are plans that take the ideas in your head and put them on paper.  This process is the 'Acid Test' of you your ideas. Writing out your goals and assumptions forces logic into the driver's seat.

 

We work with out client's to help them develop the second type of plans - plans to make money.  There are lots of software and wordsmiths out there to help you with the first type, but it is simply not our thing.

Business Planning

Once you have produced a written business plan, now the hard work starts -- IMPLEMENTATION

The most likely result from most business plans is that they end up on a shelf never to see the light of day again. The planning process alone is immensely valuable because of the thought discipline required. But, how more valuable might planning be if you actually made it happen? We can provide you with some help on this process as well. 

How can you get Your Plan Implemented?

  1. Boil your plan down to a "One-Page" summary that shows the goals, values, and strategies.  This "One-Page" can be customized to different departments and people to provide guidance to them of what is important.

  2. Design Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for each specific strategy to provide you with an easy way to see how well the implementation process is going.

  3. Weekly meetings to provide accountability and identify problems that need to be fixed. Each of these meetings should result in a new Action Plan for the next week.

  4. Monthly comparisons of your plans projected financial results with actual results. If things aren't going to plan, this is the time to make changes to the plan. Business Plannings should not be an annual event. 

Here is Our Eight Step Systematic Approach to Business Planning

  1. Sharpen up the vision by getting it written

  2. Perform a SWOT Analysis (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities –Threats)

  3. Identify the niche and Unique Selling Proposition

  4. Establish the purpose with a written mission statement and list of values

  5. List the stakeholders and identify their primary wants

  6. Develop the strategies to satisfy those wants

  7. Take the results from the previous steps and write up the plan

  8. Produce an action plan to implement the various strategies

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