The Dos and Don'ts of Business Planning

“Business Planning coming out the back end of the year going into New Year. (not just for the new year, can be applied at anytime)

I'd just finished a 3-day workshop on Strategy and Tactical Planning with a multinational, which got me thinking around what we need to do as business owners exiting the year going into the new year.

For me, we need to set our vision in place and look at where we want to be in the next three years and how that drops into the next 12-months. We need to be driving that vision and strategy with data. We might be looking at business growth, might be lead generation, might be conversion rate. But we need data as a base point.

It could also be that we haven't got that sort of data to hand. So, we're looking at business diagnostics, we may be looking at SEO, we may be looking at email campaigns, our website analytics, at our lead generation systems and procedures, sales, and marketing, even our own leadership. Either way, we need to be operating with data.

Once we've got that 3-year vision, an aligned 12-month Strategy/Business Plan, we need to understand and build the tactical projects we are going to be putting in place on a 90-day basis, ensuring the actions are aligned with our 12-month Strategy. So, every quarter, what are we going to do that turns the dials on our profit and growth in moving forward in the new year?

When we look at this 90-day period most consultants or business coaches I've come across say to monitor and review every 90-days as well. This is absolute b******s, your Business Plan needs to be reviewed on a monthly basis. We need to know our numbers. We need to know where we are from a business perspective. We can change, if necessary, we can absolutely turn our focus elsewhere if something happens externally, or possibly internally, but we need to be reviewing that data on a monthly basis.

For me, this time of year (end of the year, beginning of the year latest), we need to be setting in stone what we want to be doing in the New Year and the projects we need to put in place to drive Profit and Growth.”