Many small business owners don’t have a lot of interest in business planning. And that’s probably understandable because traditional business planning is designed for large and stable businesses. That approach does not reflect the realities of small business life. So conventional business plannings doesn’t bring a lot to the table for all the work involved.
We think that planning is important so we have taken a different approach which is better suited to the realities of a small business owners’ life. It is far simpler, much quicker to do and easily varied to reflect the current realities of your business.
The main tools are listed below and you can follow the links for details
GamePlans Make Business Planning Closer to Reality
Conventional plans ask you to make estimates of where you will be in 1 year or 3 years. These are often (generally) wild guesses and bear little relationship to what actually happens in an often, fast changing, small business environment. How many business plans went out the window when COVID hit in 2020? In fact, the military acknowledge that a battle plan becomes out of date the moment the first shot is fired.
Our GamePlans are based on small business reality. We think you can see fairly well ahead for at least the next financial quarter so GamePlans are most often done each quarter to reflect the current direction and reality.
Follow this link to drill down on our GamePlan methodology
StrategyTrees Highlight Key Business Plan Elements to Address
Wordy Plans are confusing to read and grasp. We take a different and more flexible approach.
We show how to;
- choose perhaps 4-6 Critical Success Factors (CSF) that must be addressed in the next GamePlan.
- Each of these then has several Necessary Conditions (NC) which must be in good working order for the CSF, and hence the GamePlan, to be successful.
- You, as Owner, then choose the most mission-critical NC for the success of the plan and work on that first.
- Then rinse and repeat.
This means you have clearly identified the business plan’s critical factors and what has to be done to get them working OK. And you are always working on the most critical of the critical; so operating very efficiently.
Better, StrategyTree elements can be written in dot point format so are very clear and easily changed and re-prioritised as circumstances change. Your StrategyTree business plan is always reflecting the current reality.
Follow this link to drill down on our StrategyTree business plan methodology
Marketing Plans are Specialised Business Plans
Revenue generation via marketing is generally an important component of the wider planning process.
We show that they can follow the same routine of GamePlan and StrategyTree to make them as useful as possible. This way, you are highlighting what aspects of marketing are the most critical to address and then sprinting towards solving those aspects as quickly as possible. If circumstances change, your dot-pointed marketing plan is easy to overhaul.
Follow this link to drill down on our Marketing business plan resources
Business Diagnostic System for Planning Insights
When facing problems with planning in general, you can drill down on the symptoms of your problem until you find a candidate solution using our Business Diagnostics.
Full list of Business Plan Diagnostics
Or you can go straight to the part of Business Diagnostics which covers Planning on the above link
Business Coaching Available for Business Planning
Sometimes getting started with our planning process is a bit overwhelming. Other times, you have come to a bit of a dead end and could do with some “brainstorming” help.
In either case, our on-demand Business Coaching service is available whenever and as often as you wish.
Catalogue of Business Planning Resources
The full collection of our resources relating to Planning is on the link above