Been to see a business advisor, bank manager, grant body? Enr0lled in a business assistance scheme? Joined a business support program? More than likely you’ve been told to write a business plan.
Why? Did anyone explain that? And why is that plan almost certainly now on the “must revisit some day” pile, steadily sinking into oblivion?
There’s enough research to back up our intuition that having a plan is a good thing. Like 30% faster growth, and 71% of fast-growth companies do it, and there’s reduced chance of failure. But four out of five Australian businesses don’t have a written business plan.
Frankly, I don’t blame them. Two vital facts about business plans are almost never discussed:
- The audience that matters is you, the business owner;
- The process is infinitely more valuable than the end product.
Let’s take them in order. If you have to produce a business plan to get a loan or a grant (or a stock exchange listing, for that matter) – do it. The exercise will show you valuable facts about your business from an outsider’s perspective, and help you develop a clearer and broader view of your own business.
And there’s the real reason to invest time in business planning. It gets you to a concise and clear understanding of how you are going to achieve your business goals. In that sense, it sits between your strategy and your action plan; revise it more often than your strategy, less often than your to-do list. Use it all the time, to track your performance, correct your course, learn from what worked and what didn’t.
The second secret meshes with the first. It’s the process of doing the thinking that makes business planning valuable. The plan itself will change when you get your next surprise, pleasant or unpleasant. The work of thinking and planning will give you the resilience and insight to generate options and change direction when reality bites.
In our experience, a good business planning process is a balance between too much structure (just following a formula or template), and too little (going in circles). Calling in an advisor will help. Give us a call, let’s see if our experience and toolbox can help you use business planning as your secret sauce.