Dump Unworkable 3 Year Business Plans!
Most small business owners are hard pressed to know where they will be in 3 to 6 months; let alone in three years time!
Why bother to build a 3 year plan when the one thing you can be sure of is that you will not hit your (totally guesswork) planned target.
The 12Faces GamePlans are a custom-build planning strategy for small business owners that takes into account your realities when navigating the direction of your businesses.
All GamePlans are designed around our Mission of your Sustainable Business Success.
GamePlans build a repeatable routine using the same principals that made Toyota great. You decide what is important to improve in the next Financial Quarter. Then you orchestrate a series of short sprints to bring home that improvement. If you can’t reach the original Quarterly destination, you pivot off to something more achievable .
That way, you move forward as quickly as possible on what is most important at that point in time. But remain flexible to shoot off in a different direction with minimal lost time and money if circumstances change; as they all to often do in the small business world.
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Stop the Rudderless Drifting
Every business owner needs a clear destination in mind for their business; in both the short (say financial quarter) and longer (say 3 years) term. We call these Business GamePlans
Without this, the business is essentially ‘rudderless’ and will drift in unguided and unpredictable directions. Entrepreneurs are famous for “being attracted to the next bright shiny object” and going off in some new direction.
This confuses the staff and makes it difficult for a business to get enough traction to thrive.
Pre-designed and Custom GamePlans
There are life cycle stages and management problems in a businesses life that occur in many businesses. We have assembled off-the-shelf GamePlans to cover many of these so you don’t have to spend a lot of time researching. You just tap into the best practices we have assembled for you and make any tweaks to customise for your particular business.
Or, you can build a DIY custom GamePlan from scratch for your particular circumstances. We show you how to do this as well.
Three Pre-designed GamePlan Groups
Our GamePlan Resources are matrixed into three groups;
- Business Life Cycle Stage GamePlans: Start-up, Growth, Lifestyle and Exit
- Business Size GamePlans: Solopreneur, Micro, Small and Larger businesses and
- GamePlans for the mission critical aspects of a business; Revenue Generation, Operations and Administration
So you could tap into GamePlans for e.g. Micro Businesses in a Growth Phase and therefore needing More Revenue
Don't Waste Time Reinventing The Wheel!
You have basic choices about where you spend every hour of your time.
- You can work on an aspect of your business that directly earns you an income but struggle to research how to improve or,
- You can spend that time on time-intensive original research into how to improve some aspect of your business in the fond hope you will understand, digest then implement the topic and hope it will pay back later or,
- Just like your accounting, you can outsource the problem to experts then spend much less time digesting and implementing what they suggest – and all the time earn from doing your day job. The best of both worlds!
Our GamePlans have:
- Sieved through the advice of the world’s best minds on a particular topic
- Re-fashioned it to suit small business
- Present it as a 90 day road map to implementing that improvement so
- When you start a GamePlan you instantly have access to all that background experience so you start improving your business from Day One. No wasted Learning Curve
No Overwhelming and Repetitive Complexity!
The big problem reading a DIY book is you have to read the whole thing just to get a few grains of “wheat” from a ton of “straw”!
Our GamePlans do all that for you so they have distilled out the best “wheat” from all that “straw” before you even pick them up.
Better, instead of you having to read everything – even stuff you already know – over and over to find the “wheat”, we link off to topic to allow you a deeper dive into it only when you want to read further. You only read what you don’t already know and that speeds up your planning tremendously.
Have you heard the saying “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know”?
When you research yourself, you never know if you have covered the whole topic. With our constantly improving GamePlans you have our knowledge and the combined suggested improvement from a host of previous users. Instead of just your brain being applied to the problem, you have a Mastermind group working for you!
Make Planning A Team Effort; Stop Being a One Person Band
As a Founder - Owner, you spend a lot of your time as a one-person-band trying to do every aspect of the planning task yourself.
Remove that stress by benefiting from the team effort already gone into our GamePlans and have a help desk just an email away - at no extra charge.
To Access the GamePlan Menu, you MUST Register. But we have a FREE, No Obligation Option
Don’t lose touch with us in your busy world and receive our weekly email list of 5 minute tips to boosting your business. Unsubscribe at any time.
Introduction to GamePlanning
Our Mission is your Sustainable Business Success. Part of Sustainability is being able to repeat a process consistently, reliably and economically. That’s what we introduce in this “Work Smarter, Not Harder” article
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Our concept of 3 year and Quarterly GamePlans is introduced in this article. It also expands on the tools and other resources designed to integrate and work seamlessly towards achieving the goals of the two types of GamePlans you chose.
Business Life Cycle Related GamePlans
Businesses are like people; they are born, grow, settle down in midlife and eventually exit. We encourage you have a longer term (we suggest 3 years) GamePlan identifying where you want to be in the lifecycle in 3 years time. Then, shorter GamePlans (we suggest financial quarters) help get your business there. No Life Cycle GamePlan is right or wrong; it’s what best suits you at this time.
Business Life Cycle plans cover:
- Startups: the most traumatic part of the business lifecycle
- Failing Business Turnaround: restarting troubled business
- Growth: big challenge is to juggle all aspect of fast changing business
- Lifestyle: tuning business for acceptable income, workload and stress so you have a life
- Exit: refocusing business to make attractive to buyer
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To Access the GamePlan Menu, you MUST Register. But we have a FREE, No Obligation Option
Business Size Related GamePlans
Small business is sometimes classified by the number of staff employed. Size classifications vary around the world. We have chosen group sizes likely to be facing the same sorts of problems and have assembled resource catalogues for each group. The Size GamePlans typically cover 2-3 years for each phase as you pace your expansion rate. You can improve your existing business AND look ahead to the next size range to see what issues you will face and be prepared for them. Covers;
- Solopreneurs: businesses run by single founder/owner
- Micro (1-4 staff): covers the “firsts” like first staff member. A big jump requiring you to more than double your revenue to cover extra wages
- Small (5-19 staff): covers the issues with bigger teams and introducing first middle management layer
- Medium (20-199 Staff) and Large Business (>199 Staff)
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Revenue Boosting Quarterly GamePlans
Increasing sales is often as far as owners look when trying to increase revenue. In fact, there are a number of other faster and less gruelling ways to increase revenue. Get started on your revenue boosting GamePlan with these resources.
GamePlan Course: Growth365
The Growth365 (G365) Course is a pre-designed quarterly GamePlan which explores the topic of “What might stop your growth” in the first of three lessons. This lesson highlights a number of reasons growth might not be effective for you. It is worth a quick scan at least to see if growth is on your horizon. The other two lessons cover “Planning for Growth” and “How to execute a Double your Profit strategy”. They may be of interest but not as relevant for a Micro Business.
Diagnostics: Revenue Increase Choices
We have catalogued more than 8 ways to increase revenue; and only 1 is increasing sales. Explore candidate quarterly GamePlans via this link.
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Quarterly GamePlans to Improve Operations
Operations loosely refers to all the processes and resources used to carry out the work of the business. There are a very large number of improvements that are possible. They can be loosely grouped into those optimizing by reducing existing costs and those improving productivity to produce more efficiently.
GamePlan Outline: Optimize Business Operations
If your business has been operating for a while, it most likely has accumulated “barnacles” that are slowing down progress and diverting resources to activities no longer key. This quarterly GamePlan Outline identifies typical opportunities for improving the operation of a business. Any such cost savings typically go straight to the bottom line profit so optimizing is a very useful program to run; perhaps annually to continually harvest savings.
Diagnostics
Our business improvement resources are grouped by topic in the Diagnostics System. Look though the topics at the high level overview you reach on the link above, then drill down on ones of interest to explore more quarterly GamePlan options.
To Access the GamePlan Menu, you MUST Register. But we have a FREE, No Obligation Option
Don’t lose touch with us in your busy world and receive our weekly email list of 5 minute tips to boosting your business. Unsubscribe at any time.
Quarterly GamePlans to Improve Administrative Processes
Administration is often the task least-loved by small business owners so it is often underexploited for productive improvement. As a consequence, bad trends are sometimes not spotted until they turn toxic. In turn that consumes money, owner’s time and increases owners stress. In a well balanced 12Faces business, this risk is greatly reduced.
Eventually, administration can be subjected to continuous incremental improvement (so called Kaizen) but initially, it might benefit from a quarterly GamePlan overall or in specific areas of admin to make large and quick gains.
Common areas in administration that lend themselves to GamePlans include;
- Human Resources: like leading and incentivizing staff
- Financial management: like cash flow, useful accounting systems
- Planning: GamePlans and more detailed strategies
- Profitability: monitoring and streamlining for profit
Diagnostic: Administrative GamePlan Opportunities
Look through the opportunities for improvement grouped by topic on the link above. Drill down in areas you think might be worthwhile considering as a candidate for a quarterly GamePlan. Then use the techniques we teach to prioritize your candidate GamePlans and begin working though them over several quarters in priority.
GamePlan Course: Business Turnaround90
The Turnaround90 Course is a pre-designed quarterly GamePlan which explores how to rapidly improve a business experiencing financial hardship.
You save time by working though possible options, executing those that can improve the situation and skipping or postponing those less useful in your particular case.
To Access the GamePlan Menu, you MUST Register. But we have a FREE, No Obligation Option
Don’t lose touch with us in your busy world and receive our weekly email list of 5 minute tips to boosting your business. Unsubscribe at any time.
Backup Resources
There will be many issues that come up in your business that we have not covered or not covered clearly enough.
We have other tools to help clarify how to attack the issues that are worrying you. Please use them as much as you wish. We can respond and use your input to improve our service to others who come after you.
Performance Coach
It can be lonely being a business leader. Sometimes you will feel you can benefit from another person’s advice or guidance but can’t ask staff. We offer a Performance Coaching Service on an as-requested basis for just these times. Use the link above to learn more.
Community Forum
Our Community Forum is open to any registered business as a FREE service to our community. You can post a query here for others to comment. You can, and are very welcome to, respond to questions yourself.
12Faces Support System
If you spot a broken element on our website or an error in our resources, we appreciate you opening a support ticket or just emailing us direct to reception@backstop.business
Email us Directly
You can pass on questions and comment to us directly to our main email address; reception@backstop.business
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