You’ve spent years building a business. Starting with your concept, you’ve bet your career and, perhaps, much of your asset base to create a successful entity. Guiding your business becomes a significant challenge. Along with growth comes a different type of leadership.
In the early years, planning was more about hustle and selling than careful planning. Proprietary technologies, exclusive licenses and unique product offerings provided easy foundations upon which to build a business.
As success builds, competitors notice. Soon, competition crowds the marketplace. Similar offerings erode the uniqueness of your business model. Incremental sales become more difficult. Defending market share becomes a priority for which few are prepared.
Now, what? The secret lies in the business basics you may have considered years ago but never implemented. Now, planning is as important as building or sustaining your business.
Planning, Reframed
Myths around having a business plan focus on it being too onerous, a waste of time, a single leader task without team engagement. On the contrary, a successful planning process can be scaled to your business size and development stage. It does not have to be a week-long process, but it does have to be thoughtful, well-researched, adventurous, measured, realistic and uniquely competitive. The time you invest is just that, an investment in your company’s future. This is often more valuable than other investment options and has the potential to pay significant dividends.
Like your intuition, a single voice is just that and often misses the variety and diversity needed in a crowded marketplace. The best leaders realize that ideas come from all levels of the organization. Even recommendations that seem impossible contain points of learning and, perhaps, enhance other ideas. Discounting ideas from non-traditional sources is easy and a key challenge for many leaders. It’s natural to eliminate ideas that challenge a comfortable state. However, diversity of customers and market factors are best met by a diversity of ideas and business drivers.
RACE: A Framework for Planning
Building a business plan is as important as funding, investing and sustaining your business. A right-sized plan has many tangible and intangible benefits. It can produce visible results to inform stakeholders. Clean financials combined with a thoughtful business plan can impress stakeholders like banking partners, investors and future purchasers. The intangible results come with the engagement and inspiration of your team. The dividend here is as meaningful and beneficial to sustainable business success.
1. RESEARCH the Essentials
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- Start with a personal assessment of your openness and development areas as a business leader.
- Research market, competition, customers, products, services and support.
- SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) the entire business by key divisions and team members. Spread the work to key leaders, who enlist their teams in a bottom-up process for real discovery.
2. ANALYZE the Impacts
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- Investigate how are these forces impairing or fueling your business.
- Assign a financial or resource impact of key research findings.
- Again, a team approach benefits by enlisting internal analysts among your team.
3. CREATE the Plan Including Targets and Contingencies
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- Look for Inspiration: Think broadly here. Look at other, adjacent industries, companies and standout leaders. Market analysts provide great reports. Our commercial integration industry is no different with helpful state-of-the-industry and deep dive reports.
- Create Imperatives with Targets: Look across the organization, in each department, and determine what accomplishments could fuel growth. Choose 4-8 depending on business and constraints. More is not always better.
- Include the Team: Be open-minded here as Sales generates revenue. But, tech support can generate sales. Marketing can generate sales through key influencer relationships. Training can grow sales of existing stakeholders just by refreshing their grasp of applications.
- Department Level Mini-Plans: Take each target and build a mini-plan to success for each. What human and capital resources are needed? Who is best equipped to marshal the team? How long until were ready to launch the plan?
- Resource Planning: Topline revenue and bottom-line profit are not enough. Build a detailed financial plan to support the organizational plan.
- Create Contingencies: With market shifts, economic disruptions, and team transitions, an effective plan should include contingencies for key bets. Contingency statements are easy: define the “If” or the event that triggers the “then” or aligned solution. This saves time and resources by enacting a thoughtful plan in record time.
4. EXECUTE the Plan and Track the Results
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- Create a simple, one-page summary of targets and track results.
- Quarterly check-in meetings are helpful to remain on schedule, adjust throughout the year, ensure team alignment, and course-correct any issues.
- Post the targets and results for the organization to rally and strive to achieve.
Watch out for the next article in the Business 101 for Integrators series! It will include additional tips for building a robust yet efficient plan and extracting its value.
