Archive - July 2020

For “old” readers of this blog, you know that I truly believe that every small business must have a business plan.

The statistics prove it – 80% of small businesses fail within 5 years of starting and of those, less than 10% had prepared a business plan. Businesses don’t plan to fail – they just fail to plan.

Without a business plan, no matter how expert you are in what you do, you will find that you work hard every day without getting any closer to where you want to go.

This is because, without a plan, you have no strategic direction and you have no priorities. Every decision you have to make becomes a time-suck because you have to think about what’s right and what’s wrong every time.

If you had a business plan, you would have your long-term goals established as your strategic direction, you would know what you had to achieve over time, you would know what you had to do next.

Every decision then becomes easy to make as you measure it against your strategic direction – “would this get me closer to my ultimate goal faster or not?”

With the goalposts clearly defined by the business plan and the plan’s detailed roadmap, you will know what is important to work at on a day-to-day basis, what to do, when to do it, and in what order.

No more “what do I do next?”

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If you are thinking of writing your business plan using my simple step-by-step process (which is explained below), there are a number of things you need to do to get ready.

The key to a successful – and actionable – business plan is the preparation.

Before you start doing the work, you need to make a few decisions so that when you do the work, you are focused and you don’t have to take side-steps to decide on what to do or what to leave in and leave out.

This is step 1 of my step-by-step business planning process – “Get Ready!”

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