A Plan is the Beginning

A business plan is critical to the sustainable success of any type, but it’s not only about the plan. Until you take action, even the best plan produces nothing, the plan is the beginning. With planning and action being ultimate teammates – respecting them equally will deliver significantly better results.

Let’s consider a business plan, but equally it could be for your local sports club.

To get started, take a couple of minutes and write down the answers to these questions:

1. 1. Vision – WHAT you are hoping to achieve? Be ambitious!
   2. Values – WHAT do you stand for? What things are not negotiable; i.e. social and culture?
   3. Who is involved? The main people of your business must be involved. Use their input classifying this under different headings; i.e. product, budgeting, marketing etc
   4. Who are your customers and what do they want and need? Be as specific as you can.
   5. What differentiates your business /offer from others?  What is your USP, your Unique Selling Proposition?
   6. Why are you in business? Make this very personal, specifically about you and your customers?
   7. What is your business structure – how are you set up?
   8. What innovation and improvements will you, do you need to, develop? Don’t limit this to just products.
   9. How do you intend to grow or scale your business?
   10.  How will you protect your Revenue, Point of Difference, Intellectual Property and Systems?
   11. How will you generate a flow of new and return customers?

Your answers will help form the foundation of your plan, making it much easier to get your plan down on paper, regardless of whether you use a template or not.

I also suggest you do a SWOT to refresh your understanding of your current reality. Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats will help frame the context of your plan.

Prevent ‘Business Plan Disease’.

There are several threats to a healthy planning attitude and business plan. In the beginning, these could be over confidence, impatience or impetuousness. When managed and put in balance, these attributes can be real assets, sitting at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit. Left unchecked, they will sabotage your opportunity for success.

The real threat to a business plan is process.

Any plan that is simply mechanical, operational and predictable will become nothing more than a strait jacket for the business, resulting in institutionalised behaviour. To avoid this, you need to allow your business plan to morph and change, a mandate to continually evolve. A plan that embraces change and improved thinking will progressively become more innovative and will be more able to embrace opportunity and adapt to threats. When you maintain the ongoing involvement of your main people in your business plan, you will keep it alive with its vision, values and objectives. This cements the vision into the business, encouraging meaning and purpose to be embraced by more than just you. 

One way to do this might be to share different iterations of the business plan with different levels of your business. For example, the 5-year goals might have more meaning to the owners and senior managers. The 1-year goals being more relevant to the heads of departments and the 90-day goals to the staff.  Consider where the real value of their input lies.

Be ambitious.

Big goals are worth working towards, needing a lot of smaller tasks and milestones to be done to get you there, so write a list, remembering that with big goals there will be big lists. 

Don’t be put off by this! These lists are full of opportunities, enabling critical benchmarks to be set to measure your progress, allowing you to incrementally celebrate success. This is essential both in maintaining your momentum but also your own engagement and that of your people.