If you take a look through the bookshelves of the business section you’ll find plenty of books on writing business plans, either whole volumes or dedicated chapters in some “start your own business and live the lazy life of a bajillionaire because anyone can” kind of book. Hell, your bank will probably give you a kit to fill in the gaps on a business plan to convince you that you need to buy an overdraft facility from them.
All these resources happily tell you about executive summaries, financial projections, SWOT, PEST and maybe even a Boston Matrix to throw in. You’ll write reams about your competitors, the market opportunity and the fabulous CVs of the core management team.
But you won’t learn how to write a document that sits on your desk for the next year and becomes the roadmap, the measure against which everything you do can be judged.
That’s what I’m going to try and do in the coming posts. It’s not something I’ve actually done before, so I thought I’d share the journey over the next few weeks of how we try to crack this particular nut.
By the end of the story, I hope we’ll have a step by step guide to creating a RealPlan™ (ho ho) and not just another 100 pages of wind.
We’ll know if we’ve got a successful RealPlan if we have a document that, in the light of our Goal:
1: Summarises our best thinking about the market, our opportunity, what we do and our place in the world;
2: Tells us in no uncertain terms where we need to be in 12 months time;
3: Gives us a step by step plan to get there, and actual doing plan with things to push and pull and colour in;
4: Gives us room to branch out or change route if our month on month experience dictates it;
5: Allows us to ask any question of whether we should do the next thing we were going to do, or not;
6: It sits within arm’s reach on all our desks to provide inspiration and instruction during the working day / week / month / year;
7: At the end of the year, it’s crossed off, scribbled on, dog eared and shelved;
The Starting Point
We set a revenue goal, pure and simple. There’s nothing airy about it, we can measure it and easily know if we’re successful. There’s a difference between a goal that has only two possible outcomes (you did it, you didn’t do it) and an aspiration like “be the best maker of widgets in the UK”. I want to wake up on Dec 1st next year and know whether we won or lost the game.
Opportunities
So – our goal is to exceed a specific turnover in 12 months time, so it seems reasonable to begin with the opportunities that we can exploit to make more money from what we’ve got.
In traditional business speak, opportunities are “external factors that contribute to the achievement of the goal”. That seems way off, so we redefined it as “any way we can extract extra revenue streams from our existing business model”.
In very broad terms we reaslised that there are four categories that any revenue enhancing activity fits into. Splitting into these four distinct and pretty much exclusive groups has helped us generate a huge list of opportunities by adding some structure to our brainstorming:
1: Make more widgets and sell them to our existing customers
2: Make more from each widget sale
3: Find more customers to buy our widgets
4: Sell new products and services independent of our widgets
In around a four hour session we managed to come up with about 50 new ways to make more from what we have available to us in the company, all fitting into one of the four groups above.
The next step will be to compile our brainstorm into a useable list and devise a way of rating each idea with the goal of prioritising on the timeline for the year. The next step will be to list all our horrible weaknesses that might cause us grief in trying to go after any of our new opportunities..
Suddenly, what seemed like a monster task is becoming a very busy, but seemingly achievable one.
Step Two to follow…
