Short Business Action Plans - Do They Work?

Short Business Action Plans - Do They Work?

If your are a smaller business or department (of a larger organization), I encourage you to utilize the power of business action plans.

Why? Well breaking a large annual business plan format down into bite size chunks makes it much easier to implement. Team morale tends to fuse together when there is common purpose towards determined action.

I favour using this format for 90 day periods.

Short action over 90 days is much easier to implement than long annual plans.
Although mentioned in many business text books it appear around 50% of all businesses have no plan and fly along "on the seat of their pants".

I have found through experience that the result in term of profit and revenue suffer over time for those businesses without short or long term planning.
Message and their is evidence of this, a plan is better than no plan.

Even better, consider breaking long term plans down into various 90 day business action plans. If you are a larger business consider having 1 business action plan of 90 days duration for each main area. Therefore you may end up with 3 or 4 plans (dependant of how many divisions or departments).

Small teams working on smaller plans every 90 days is a recipe for business success. Consider this the next time you update your business action plans.

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Steps to Write a Business Plan - 10 Common Mistakes

Steps to Write a Business Plan - 10 Common Mistakes

Unfortunately mistakes abound before, during and after people take the steps to write a business plan. Here are some common ones. The aim is for you to be aware of these as you go through the process and I hope it can help you ultimately avoid them.

The Common Mistakes

1. Failure to define exactly what your primary aim or ideal future is in the very beginning of the process.

2. Making the business plan format process long, drawn out and too complicated.
Keep it Simple Simon (K.I.S.S)

3. Failure to integrate the finished plan into all levels of the organization.

4. Keeping planning separate from the management on a day-to-day basis.

5. Developing only superficial mission, value and vision statements rather than passionate, inspirational and motivating words that truly reflect the culture of the business.

6. BIG MISTAKE: Failure to implement the plan effectively. Too often, so many hours go into planning only to find it sitting in the desk drawer gathering dust.

7. Lacking a scoreboard to measure the important rather than what is easy.

8. Neglecting to focus in some way on what the competition is doing and having some market intelligence on your industry position.

9. Using confusing, complex languaging in the written plan.

10. Conducting only long range financial forecasting and neglecting the short term targets.

Be Single Minded About Your Single Minded Proposition

In your business plan format, do you have a clear, unique point of view about your company or service? You see without this, I have found it increasingly difficult to convince others to be involved in your organization as a customer or team member.

We all love clear, specific instruction. So too it is with successful enterprises. They all seem to have a clear, uncluttered view on their own strengths and communicate this effectively in one sentence, slogan or saying. Marketing pieces (in multiple forms) can have this slogan or catch cry which in turn helps communicate the vital message.

My advice to anyone in business is to find your unique selling proposition, your major benefit, your value to the customer and once you have it - shout it from the rooftops. Shout it to the world! Get out there and do yourself a favor.

Here is an example of Minolta's unique selling proposition: MINOLTA - We Understand the Office. Printers, faxes, photocopiers! Now this has been seen on many huge billboards throughout America and elsewhere. What do you think when you see a company put specifically, clearly and without hesitation their major unique strength out to the world?

Tell you what I think. I see strength of purpose. I see professionalism. I see the courage to say it in the first place and I see increased sales the result of this simple but extremely valuable branding.

Now what could your business do to emulate this?

Once you find it include it in your company's business plan.