Business Planning for Success

This book, Business Planning for Success, is intended as an aid and prompt for those who wish to write their own Business Plan. Developing a Business Plan will force you to think through some important issues that you may not otherwise consider - a cathartic process. Your plan will become a valuable tool as you set out to raise money for your business and it will provide milestones in your control process to gauge your success by measuring results against aims and objectives. In Australia in particular, formal Business Planning has not been widely practised or adhered to, and it is only in fairly recent years that it has become almost mandatory in some instances. A Business Plan should be much more than a collection of financial statements and cash flow projections. The Business Plan should tell the person reading it how you are going to obtain strong results including sustained growth and profits, loyal customers and a high performing workforce. To do this, your Business Plan will need to address many elements of the business especially sales and marketing as well as people (human resources), processes, customers (forming relationships), business strategies, goal setting, sales, marketing, brand building, leadership and finance. Your Business Plan should address how your business intends creating a distinct and profitable niche in its market place utilising your unique selling proposition. A favourite topic of mine in regard to Business Planing is how some ‘business professionals’ place huge emphasis on a budget and the associated cash flow as a key element of their Business Plan preparation while completely ignoring how the business will actually create these budgeted cash flows. These ‘business professionals’ apparently do not understand (and have no knowledge of) people, processes, customers, business strategies, sales, marketing, brand building and leadership. A Business Plan should be a dynamic document and not sit on the shelf after it has been finalised. Many people fall into the trap of preparing a Business Plan and after some initial use and reference to it, the Business Plan is filed away and never referred to again. Your Business Plan should be constantly referred to and constantly updated, taking into account market forces and the constant change involved in most industries. One business we have an association with, reviews, revises and fine tunes their Business Plan on a monthly basis after a review of the previous months trading results. Thus, someone needs to be responsible for driving the Business Plan! And remember - a Business Plan should be like a laser - not a shotgun! I have written this book based on many years of practical experience in the preparation of successful Business Plans for large and small businesses. I first wrote a book on Business Planning in 1996 which had eight printings; this book was subsequently translated into three languages and published in a number of overseas