“What? No, I don’t have a business plan. I’m not a startup.”
Too bad so many small business owners think that way. A good lean business plan for small business owners ought to be a great tool for running a business. Set strategy, tactics to match, major milestones, metrics, tasks, responsibilities, and essential business numbers. Keep it lean, review and revise it every month, and you’re way better off. Whether you’re a startup or an ongoing business. Just like planning a trip makes the trip better, so too, planning a business makes the business better.
That myth of the business plan for start-ups only gets in the way far too often. If you own or run a company, you probably want to grow it. And if you want to grow a company, then you want to plan that growth. And the planning is only the beginning; you want to use the full planning process to manage growth.
Think for just a minute about how many different reasons there are for an existing company to plan (and manage) it’s growth. There’s the need first of all to control your company’s destiny, to set long-term vision and objectives and calculate steps to take to achieve vision. Without planning the company is reacting to events, following reality as it emerges. With planning, there’s the chance to proactively lead the company towards its future.
For an existing company that wants to grow, planning process is essential. Everybody wants to control their own destiny. The planning process is the best way to review and refresh the market and marketing, to prioritize and channel growth into the optimal areas, to allocate resources, to set priorities and manage tasks. Bring a team of managers together and develop strategy that the team can implement. Work on dealing with reality, the possible instead of just the desirable, and make strategic choices. Then follow up with regular plan review that becomes, in the end, management.
This normally starts with a plan. The plan, however, is just the beginning. It takes the full cycle to make a plan into a planning process. Here’s my view of the business plan for small business owners:
Interested? Download my new book on the Lean Business Plan: Lean Business Planning with LivePlan
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