Successful Business Plans

Everyone has prepared your small business plan. Well, should that read, everyone should have prepared your own business plan? My thinking is always that these tend just to be prepared when needed, instead of as a useful business tool for all those senior management. My five ingredients are:

1. Understand what your small business plan is;

2. Understand what you wish to use it for;

3. Identify and implement the critical steps to achieving an effective business plan;

4. Understand what ought to be included in the master plan;

5. Be aware about gaps or weaknesses within your plan.

What is your small business plan?

A business strategy plan sets your method for managing a specific activity more than a specific future period.

Why are strategic business plans needed?

Business plans are required essentially for that four following reasons:

1. A formal, explicit document with the planning process;

2. A request finances;

3. A framework for approval;

4. A tool for operational business management.

What include the critical steps necessary to achieve a prosperous business plan?

This may come to be a surprise to my fellow business consultants, but producing an excellent business plan just isn’t as difficult as people often think, providing they follow could possibly sequence. Here is my considered view about the critical steps.

1. Understand what you’re planning and why;

2. Define those activities of your organisation;

3. Outline the actual position on the business;

4. Review and discuss the external market conditions, undertake and understand a competitive analysis, and define your market positioning;

5. Define your core objectives;

6. Prepare and articulate the tactic to attain and match the objectives;

7. Identify and review risks and opportunities;

8. Prepare a tactic to deal with risks and exploit opportunities;

9. Refine the strategies into operational plans;

10. Prepare financial forecasts including revenues, costs, cash-flow, capital expenditure and assumptions adopted;

11. Finalise the blueprint;

12. Get it approved;

13. Use it;

14. Review it regularly boost as appropriate.

What ought to be included in the strategic plan?

Without being too prescriptive, there are particular necessary elements which need being included. Such elements are:

· Preliminaries – for instance contents, contacts and definitions;

· An executive summary;

· A description with the business;

· A review from the market, other sellers and market positioning;

· The vision, mission and objectives;

· The corporate strategy;

· The plan for developing these products and services;

· Financial projections;

· An outline in the risks and opportunities;

· A conclusion.

Understand gaps and weaknesses within here is the plan.

Any casual viewer from the BBC programme, Dragons Den are going to be aware of how easy it’s for weaknesses or gaps for being identified. Depending upon the purpose in the plan, this could, or would possibly not, prove being critical. It is often better to recognise such weaknesses and gaps, and be well prepared to manage them, either by noting them in the master plan itself, or having appropriate answers available if your need arise.

Who should prepare the blueprint?

As a small business consultant, this might sound like heresy, but I assume that any plan needs to be produced by the senior management with the organisation. That is not to state that the consultant don’t even have a role to try out in its preparation. He does. Senior management should prepare here is the plan as they will be able to present and discuss it, demonstrating on their audience that they can fully understand their business and market. I think that the consultant’s role is usually to help facilitate the preparation from the plan, the consultant can assist undertake hidden research, which enable it to cast a vital and impartial eye over the blueprint.