directedfocus

• As soon as they are printed, they are out of date.
• They are founded on endless assumptions.
• Creating them distracts you from "real work"

Those three unavoidable facts render them pointless.

When I say that most business owners heave a sigh of relief ... until I clarify the situation.

Conventional wisdom has convinced us that a business plan is a stiff formal document full of information that takes forever to complete.

If you are anything like me, and most people I speak to, business plans are associated with obsessive behavior and they're largely a waste of time, as it distracts people from what they really need to be doing ... running their business.

There is an alternative

The alternative is a process and the outcome is not a document produced for someone else ... it's a collection of goals and objectives, steps and dates with deadlines, and some really useful simple financial targets.

It involves small changes carried out on a regular basis ... each are a step in a process that helps to manage change and steer a business.

Planning isn't a "manufacturing process" where each of the steps are ticked off so as to cover all the bases as defined by some recipe or process manual.

It’s about planning and running a business in the real live world, whether you are going to show a documented outcome to somebody else or not.

What I'm finding can best be described in the following manner ...

Just Start Anywhere and Get Going.

Start with concepts, start with numbers, start with whatever suits you.

It doesn’t matter.

Do something today that you can use tomorrow.

Pick the issue that is causing you the most pain today, right now.

Form Follows Function

Your plan is not necessarily a printed or electronic document.

Your plan is what’s going to happen.

Think it, speak it, write it out in bullet form, even use pictures.

Just use what you need.

Let It Evolve Organically, as You Need It To

Having started where you need to now and by using it you can then grow it over time as you need to.

When a business plan event (bank or investors need one) happens and you require to show it to someone outside the business, then you add to it and make it more formal.

Management Basics

It’s not just a plan, it’s your business.

You should use the planning process to manage better, achieve your goals, work proactively instead of reactively.

Keep it Simple

Use only what you need.

Focus on what is important NOW!!

Keep things segmented

If you need the detailed market or industry analysis, or the rest of the supporting information, do do it now.

Do it only when you need to.

We Are Planning here Not Accounting

With all due respect if you are an accountant ... business planning isn't accounting.
It's not transposing last years tax returns into the future with some percentage changes. (this can be better than nothing)

Planning is about big picture thinking, summary and aggregation, it's about educated guesses, not tax or accounting reports.

You should approach them with flexibility and an understanding of how much uncertainty is involved.

Make it your planing

It's not about the end point it's about the process ... that you own, inside and out, with all the details.

Outsiders should be used for illumination and provocaton not to "do" your work

You control your destiny

You set your future goals and steps to achieve them.

While people think you have to have a plan to show somebody else, you want a plan as a tool to manage your own business future.

What I've written here is like waving a red rag at a bull, to many people, who publish books or make a living from selling business planning services and software.

If you absolutely must have someone like this involved they may be useful in the detail and formalisation for an external presentation but you still need to do the step before (collecting and making sense of all the applicable information) and the step after (implementation) the formal plan.

Flexibility is the Key

The key focus is to ensure that people don’t get bogged down on having a finished business plan before they "do anything else". This is planning as you go.

You’ve heard the stories of people who spent months developing their plan, but never get started.

So instead of that ... choose where you want to start. And just get going.

Creating a bigger future for yourself and your business is about planning and action.

That is pretty full on and it breaks the mould for many but if businesses are going to meet the challenges facing them some changes need to occur ... not some more of the same old same old needs to occur.