Planning for success

Writing a strong business plan isn’t always easy – but it is essential to the success of your business. Without a clear outline of your goals and strategic direction, the decisions you make may not be moving you towards your larger aims for the business. And if you do happen to make the right decision, you’ll have no way to measure your progress.

A well-designed business plan gives you a clear outline of the steps you need to take to increase growth, profitability, and cashflow in your business. It also offers a way to measure progress over time, so you can adjust goals as circumstances change.

If you don’t have an effective business plan, our planning service can help you develop one.

Your plan, your business, your benefits

Creating a plan isn’t just about writing down your goals, it’s also a good opportunity to look at where your business is going. Whether you’re a sole operator or you’re working with a partner or board of directors, it’s important to take a good look at your goals and ambitions for the business – and if you are working with a larger group, a business plan helps identify and prioritise common goals.

Planning is also about setting timeframes and creating strategies to help you achieve your goals. This might mean setting some short-term ‘quick wins’ and some longer-term strategic goals.

Finally, it’s about measurement. By making your goals realistic and explicit, you give yourself – and your team – benchmarks to measure business performance. You can use these to set individual performance goals for team members or departments, so everyone knows what’s expected and how to excel.

Making time to plan

An effective plan should include short and long-term goals, measurable revenue targets and KPIs, and details about problems slowing your business down. If your plan doesn’t have these elements, or if it’s non-existent, a planning session could help.

A member of the Thrive CA team facilitates each 4-hour workshop. Before the session, we’ll give you some work to complete, so we have all the information we need to create an effective plan.

The sessions cover: setting personal and business goals for the coming year, strategies to support those goals, setting realistic targets and KPIs, and identifying weaknesses in your business that need to be managed. If we identify any critical issues, we’ll help you develop an immediate 90-day action plan to help resolve them.

When you’re running a business, long-term planning often takes a backseat to day-to-day issues. But even if you’re busy, it’s worth dedicating some time to creating a business plan – it will pay off in the long run.

Ready to get going? Click below to book a complimentary 30 minute discovery call to discuss your Business Plan.