Business Planning
Business Planning
If Vision and Strategy form the head, heart and soul of a business, Business Plans comprise the rest of the corpus - the muscle, bones and sinews that make it all hang together and work.
Business Plans are what we call the collection of tangible, detailed analyses that comprise the targets, budgets, cashflows and resource allocation plans of the business. Every properly managed business requires these plans in one form or another - at a level of sophistication and complexity that is appropriate to their circumstances and expectations.
Solutioneering the Business Planning Process
Our Business Planning process works like this:
- Facilitate: (1) Visioning and (2) Strategic Planning meetings with key personnel.
- Establish personal and business needs, interests and aspirations (based on "the big picture"):
- Consider existing, or newly developed Strategic Plans.
- Interview owners, key personnel and significant stakeholders.
- Identify non-commercial drivers of the business and/or its owners (if any) ie: philanthropy; corporate citizenry; environmentalism; community support etc.
- Conduct additional commercial, industry or technical research, if required.
- Obtain details of past and current financial and operational performance, including products and services, markets, competitors etc.
- Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of past, current and proposed operations, including consideration of markets, products and services; competitive advantages and threats; key blockers and other limitations (extended SWOT Analysis).
- Prepare a tailored Business Planning Resource Template for the selected timeframe (3, 5 or 10 years) based on the format of existing management accounts / financial reports (this helps to simplify data extraction and comparison). Include revenue targets and matching expense budgets, capital budgets, personnel and associated resource requirements etc.
- Appoint Plan co-ordinator (usually MD, GM or CF). Allocate roles and responsibilities for completing the Plan at business division level. Agree timeframe for completion of divisional plans.
- Agree system of support, monitoring and feedback for Plan completion. Gather and review Plans for feasibility and acceptability. When accepted, consolidate into a whole of business plan. This is the new Business Plan.
- Help to design, implement and monitor the practical steps required to achieve plan objectives.
Benefits of Business Planning
Business Plans are a powerful tool for leading, managing and measuring the operations of a business. They oblige staff to become accountable for their own performance commitments and provide measurement criteria (targets and budgets) against which those accountabilities can be assessed.
Specific roles and responsibilities are allocated for specified tasks, over specified timeframes.
The process of working through personnel and operational resource requirements identifies misfits, deficiencies and redundancies in the organisation. This is a particularly useful tool for supporting major and/or difficult staffing decisions as it firmly bases these decisions on logical, non-personalised business needs. Relationship issues and commitments are therefore taken out of contention at this level, allowing them to be dealt with in a more appropriate forum.
Accordingly business leaders, and especially proprietors of family businesses, use this process to facilitate making difficult ownership, management and staffing decisions. Used this way it can feed directly into: Succession Planning and Ownership Transition .