Your Business Plan
Anna Stubbs • March 1, 2024
An ever-changing business landscape can present unforeseen challenges for any business at any time. Identifying risks and opportunities in your business model and creating a Business Plan will help you prepare for difficulties or adversities and provide clarity in the event of a crisis in the future.
Now is an ideal time to document a clear Business Plan:
- Defining what you, as business owners, want from the business; this includes cash drawings, your role, hours of work and holidays.
- Establishing your budget to ensure you’re generating enough cash to cover all expenses including tax, personal expenses, loans and asset purchases.
- Determining your critical KPIs; the most important things you need to measure to track your progress towards achieving your targets.
- Identifying your opportunities and vulnerabilities; the factors that will most impact your business recovery.
- Determining how to manage your most critical challenges.
- Establishing your 12-month and 90-day goals to ensure you’re clear on your priorities.
- Clarifying your actions to achieve those goals.
If you haven’t created a Business Plan, we can facilitate this. You’ve got the smarts on your business, what’s working and what might need to change. Our expertise lies in stress testing the numbers and pulling everything into one concise plan of attack – so if the unexpected happens, you’re prepared. Contact us today.
No one can deny that to grow your business, you must attract new potential customers (or leads). It’s how you generate these leads that’s important though. STEP is a lead generation acronym to help you generate quality leads without pointlessly blowing your marketing budget: S = Strategy T = Target E = Efficiency P = Process
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to measure the performance of your business in order to grow your numbers. Of course, the measures themselves are pointless unless there’s reflection and discussion to ensure they’re met. Here’s a simple and effective way to link KPIs to a reporting and accountability framework. Firstly, make sure there is ONE leader for each of the departments in your business: Director, Leadership, Product / Service Development, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Admin / IT. One person can lead more than one department, but two people can’t lead one department. You can also contract out departments to avoid needing a large head count of team memebrs (finance, marketing and IT can be outsourced relatively easily). Be clear on who reports to who . One person can only manage 5 or so people effectively. Consider establishing teams with team leaders to enable you to achieve a ratio under 6 to 1. Set up regular department meetings . This may be the CEO with each of the other department heads, the Operations Leader with the Operations team (if less than 5 in the Operations team) or with the Operations Team Leaders (if more than 5 in the Operations team).
One of the simplest ways to grow your bottom line is to tighten your belt and spend less.