Planning: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It – Part 3

A business plan is serious organizational muscle.

Sometimes, it all seems so mundane. Yet, it’s hard to overstate how important it is to have a group discussion with your management team; the goal is total agreement on the big things. We’ve spent hours working on our business plan before I managed to get buy-in from everybody. But, they all support this method and know it’s the way to success.

First, we plan what we are going to do, and then we write it down and hold ourselves accountable.

Find a key support person. It’s essential to have a key support person in your organization to help you form these agendas, take notes, do budgets, and create forecasts. For me, that person is our CFO, Steve. Without Steve, we wouldn’t be able to plan as effectively and efficiently as we do. So find your ‘Steve.’

We always work from an agenda that Steve wrote (with my and others’ input). There are so many things to talk about! So many factors affect the business that we need to organize, so we put everything on the agenda and then work our way through it.

One of the first things we do is review the previous year’s business plan. I read it out loud; there’s a measure of accountability in doing so. Next, we evaluate ourselves on the planning process: How well did we do? See an example of our one-page, one-year business plan. Don’t let this year run out before you make one of these for the next year.

A business plan is serious muscle. Build it. See you Thursday.