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. Particularly if circumstances change; as they all too often do in the small business world.
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 lifecycle 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 Lifecycle 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.
This is so that you can tap into GamePlans for example:
Micro Businesses in a Growth Phase and therefore needing More Revenue.
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 is what we introduce in this “Work Smarter, Not Harder” article.
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 life cycle.
- 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 that you have a life.
- Exit: refocusing your business to make it attractive to a buyer.
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.
Covers:
- Solopreneurs: businesses run by single founder/owner.
- Micro (1-4 staff): covers the “firsts”, like first staff member.
- 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)
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 resources like the following:
Improving Operations Quarterly GamePlans
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 optimising, by reducing existing costs, and those improving productivity to produce more efficiently. Examples include the following:
Quarterly GamePlans to Improve Administrative Processes
Administration is often the task least-loved by small business owners. For that reason 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 (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 incentivising staff.
- Financial management: like cash flow, useful accounting systems.
- Planning: GamePlans and more detailed strategies.
- Profitability: monitoring and streamlining for profit.
Simple GamePlan System Suits Small Business
The 12Faces GamePlan System is a central part of our Mission to improve your Sustainable Business Success.
It is based on our practical experience and improved by the feedback of those who use it.