There are many things you should plan, but what should you plan for your business? Planning comes in many forms, which combined can provide you with a blueprint to keep your business moving forward.
I consider there to be a few areas within your business that can benefit greatly from planning including a financial plan, marketing plan and a resources plan.
Before you start creating these plans, whether you’re a new business or existing, it pays to revisit your vision, mission and values for your business. These can sometimes be tricky to define. One of the simplest definitions I have ever come across:
- Vision – what are you and what are you becoming?
- Mission – what do you do? What business are you in?
- Values – which words encompass your business values?
If you haven’t worked this out yet, it can take time and a few attempts. Sometimes your business evolves in a different direction and when revisiting these, you find that they are not congruent with where you’re at now.
Therefore it’s a good idea to revisit your vision, mission and values at least once a year.
There are many and varied techniques for goal setting and planning for a new year. Let’s look at a few of my favourites:
The first method (I learnt this from Chris Brogan) relates to selecting three keywords that encompass what you want to achieve for the year. You then take your three words and map out how they can be achieved including strategies to achieve them, any distractions that may impede you, the projects to achieve the strategies, what the achieved goal (or partially achieved goal) looks like and the next step required to continue on the goals path. You can read more about this here.
The second method involves a one page document which includes summaries of your goals. You put this single page somewhere so you can see it every day, to make sure you are working on tasks that relate to achieving your goals. This will ensure you aren’t getting distracted and working on non-goal related items.
New opportunities can arise that perhaps don’t fit within your existing goals (otherwise known as bright shiny objects!) but could be awesome opportunities. So how do you determine whether they should be pursued?
Simply refer back to your mission and vision. Is the opportunity in line with these? Just by looking at this can take the shininess off an opportunity and put it back into perspective.
Once you have determined your three keywords or goals, what else needs to tie in with these?
A financial plan can entail:
- Budgets
- Forecast
- Cashflow forecasts
Depending on your needs (and what you’re actually going to use) will determine which reports you require. All of these reports can assist you in maintaining your goals and keeping yourself on track. You’ll also discover what other requirements you may need to achieve them.
A marketing plan can entail:
- Your target market
- Marketing strategies
- Marketing tools to utilise
- Marketing calendar to map out all promotions etc
A resources plan can entail:
- Business organisational chart (even if it’s just you in most positions)
- Resources required based on marketing plan
- Resources required to achieve your goals
- Resources calendar to map out when resources are required
Once you have these plans in place, you can map out the tasks that would be required on a monthly, weekly and daily basis. Your calendars will help to focus you on deadlines to achieve tasks. If you start monthly and then break it down to weekly and then daily tasks, not only will your goals feel more achievable but you’ll actually be making daily progress. This will give you a big buzz enabling you to maintain your focus and momentum.
So start today, start planning, it can take some time if you really do get into the nitty gritty but if it gives you a year’s worth of focus, wouldn’t it be worth it?
