9 Tips and Rules for Successful Business Planning * Incedo Group

9 Tips and Rules for Successful Business Planning

Business planning is more than writing a to-do list, or a series of goals such as ‘increase revenue by 10% or get three new clients’. And frankly, this is where business planning becomes a challenge for most people, and why they don’t do it.

Even those who think about planning, writing down a few goals or ideas are often frustrated with the results at the end of the year. What they wanted and the outcome are often very different. They don’t understand why and either give up on the idea of planning altogether or year after year continues down the same path with no change in results.

Planning should excite you, perhaps not the time spent planning, but thinking about your goals, dreaming big, and figuring out how to get there. It provides the opportunity for you to think creatively and imagine the possibilities. It should also scare you just a bit…to dream that big and consider what you’ll feel like when you get there.

I was running the quality control department for a food manufacturing firm in Atlanta when the president of the company told me he wanted a plan. I had no idea what to do or how to as I had never done one before. He guided me through the process. Then when I got into sales my manager required a detailed yearly plan. He taught me even more about planning. So I’ve been planning a long time and learned some things along the way that can help you.

Let me make it a bit less painful by providing 9 rules and tips.

1. Don’t start planning when you’re tired or just dealt with something negative. Remember this is a creative thinking process and should be defined by possibilities. You can’t think that way if you’re overly tired or have spent today or the last few days dealing with a problem. Those situations will limit your thinking.

2. Set aside time for planning. You have to plan to plan. Set aside uninterrupted time to allow yourself to think freely. Go someplace where you won’t be interrupted. If the weather is nice I often go to a park or playground. Being outside changes our thinking and the conversations we have with ourselves as we think about planning. I might go to a coffee shop, a library, or anywhere else where I can be alone and won’t get interrupted. It also helps if I go somewhere different than my office. Different scenery, different thinking.

3. If you did a plan last year, start with that. Review the previous year’s plan and assess how you did against your goals, what worked, and what didn’t. Part of the assessment process is evaluating what made it work, or what got in the way of successfully achieving the goal. This process will inform you of what you need to consider for the coming year.

If you didn’t plan last year, don’t worry about it. Did you have any goals, even if you didn’t write them down? Whatever you have is where you start. If you have nothing that’s fine, next year you will.

4. Start by defining categories for your goals. In what areas do you need to consider goals? Consider everything and anything, you can always discount some as you go through the planning process. Think about staffing, projects, expenses, investments, training…all the areas of business that could be important for your success in the upcoming year. Write them down.

5. Chunk out the planning process. Don’t expect to sit down for a couple of hours and get it all done. Break it into chunks. Maybe the first time slot is just thinking and writing down some ideas. Step two might be writing goals for one or more of the categories you defined. Step three might be creating the how-tos and milestones for the goals. And so on.

6. When considering the possibilities and goals don’t ask yourself how you’ll accomplish it. As soon as we ask ourselves ‘how am I going to do this’ or ‘ I don’t know how to do this’ we limit our thinking. We will dismiss the idea as a possibility because we don’t know how.

7. As you finish a section, reread it and the previous section. As you get further into the plan you may need to readjust a previous portion of the plan. For example, you’ve created goals for two projects but when you get to the section on training and development you realize that you’ll need staff to be trained for one of the projects. That may change the timing or other aspects of the goals and milestones you had previously defined.

It’s also a good idea to read through the entire plan once you have completed it.

8. Ask for help and input. This does not have to be a solo activity. Ask others for their input on your ideas and/or get their ideas. Who might you ask for help in thinking or providing insights into parts of the plan? I had two different managers work with me on planning, and worked with me a lot.

9. There are no rules. There are no rules for planning. You will evolve each time you do a plan. When I first started planning I created voluminous documents and spent 40, 50, or 60 hours or more working on it. There were many years I used mind mapping software as writing it all down in a document no longer worked for me. Some years I did a detailed plan, other less so. Or I might do a quick overall yearly plan and a detailed Q1 plan. It has to work for you and as you evolve as a professional so will your plans.

I encourage you to read a bit about goal setting and developing milestones. Those are the meat of the plan and knowing how to do them well will help you create a realistic plan. Start somewhere and begin. The plan is for you, not your boss or the company. Yes, of course, they will see it, and maybe have to approve it but the plan is for you to define your success and how to get there.