Writing a Business Plan - Part 4 of a 4-Part Series

 Creating a 3-Year Forecast

By Jeri T. Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist

Now comes the more challenging part for many entrepreneurs – forecasting. If you’re just getting started and have no history, then everything is a guess. The research you did in the earlier stages - to identify your competition and see what they’re charging, and to describe your primary target audience to understand their wants and needs - will help in this phase.

However, now you need to focus on the numbers, specifically, costs, revenue, and profit. I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet that I’ve shared with many of my clients to help them identify their expenses and potential revenue streams. The advantage of using the template is that many formulas are already created. You just need to fill in the empty cells for each month. Click here to schedule a call if you want a copy of the Excel file.

Start with your costs.

List everything you know about what it will cost to deliver your service or get your product to market, from creation to production to delivery into the hands of your customer.

A service business is more challenging since you are billing for your time. What’s your time worth? How long will it take you to produce the service item for your client whether it’s a training program, a digital design, or an architectural drawing. The end result may be tangible, but the process is all related to time and possibly materials in terms of software, printed documents, blueprints, etc.

On the other hand, if you are producing a physical product, then in addition to the time it takes you and your team to produce the product, you also have raw materials, equipment, and perhaps factory or warehouse space to cover.

If you have a physical location such as a restaurant or a bakery, you have the rental lease, the kitchen build-out expenses, raw materials to produce the food, tables and chairs, décor, signage, and staff salaries, among other things.

Don’t forget to include a salary for yourself as the business owner. If you have no idea what to charge for your time, do some Google searches online to see what the average salary would be for similar work if you were employed full-time by a company. That’s what you should be earning yourself, plus an additional 30-40% to cover benefits.

If you work out of a home office, you need to also include a percentage of your mortgage or rent, utilities, telephone, and internet costs as overhead. You would have to include these expenses if you rented office space somewhere and they should be included in your expenses worksheet to get an accurate picture of your business expenses. You can calculate this by estimating the square footage of your home that is devoted exclusively to business. Ideally, it’s a separate room in the house or apartment. But if it’s a portion of the bedroom or living room or kitchen area, calculate how much of that space is devoted to your “business”. That would include at minimum a desk, computer, and telephone. If you use your mobile phone exclusively, a best practice is to have a separate line dedicated to business and another line for personal use. That keeps your calls separate and makes it easier to track business expenses.

Once you have the estimated square footage dedicated to your business, divide that square footage by the total square footage for the house or apartment. Use that percentage and apply it to all your home expenses – rent, electricity, gas, water, phone, internet. For example, if your business occupies 200 square feet of a 1400 square foot house or apartment, divide 200 by 1400 to get the percentage to apply to your other expenses. In this scenario, it’s 14.39%. You can round up to 14.40% or round down to 14% to err on the side of caution. Multiply every expense by 14% to calculate your utilities, rent, telephone, and internet usage for the business.

Add Your Revenue Streams

Either using Excel or just a piece of paper, write down all the different ways you earn income. These may include products you sell online or in your store or the different services you provide. If you have different price points, list each one separately. This will provide better tracking and forecasting to see which items are generating the most revenue.

You may have more or less revenue in different months which is why it’s good to use Excel to track your expenses and revenue for each month with totals for the year. Once you’ve entered the numbers, you’ll get a picture of how your business is performing each month. Some months you may find you’re operating at a loss. Other months you may see that you’re making a profit. This is valuable information to help you begin to see where you may have upcoming shortfalls so you can plan ahead instead of being caught by surprise, unable to make payroll, or buy some much-needed raw materials without pulling funds out of savings or charging it to your credit card.

Create a 3-year forecast

Once you have the first year income and expenses entered, the next step is to project those for the next two years. This will give you a three-year forecast. You can start using the Excel spreadsheet I mentioned above. The first tab lists start-up expenses and then monthly recurring expenses. The next tab, called Yr 2 forecast, has space to list monthly revenue and expenses for 12 months. The rows in orange have formulas calculated and should be ignored. You just fill in the cells above those rows. This will give you a one-year picture of your business revenue and expenses. The next two tabs are used for Years 2 and 3. You can copy and paste the numbers from Yr 1 into both these tabs to reflect the revenue and expenses for each of those years.

My recommendation would be to assume a 5-10% increase in expenses in years 2 and 3 and to project a similar increase in revenue for those same years. This helps to build a forecast for the next two years. You may have consistent expenses in some areas so don’t increase those. But you may see utilities and telephone expenses increase as your business grows. And you will likely need to increase your marketing and advertising expenses each year to help generate more business traffic and customers. If you use Quickbooks or another accounting software program, you may be able to create a forecast using that program. 

Another option, which we make available to our clients, is to use LivePlan. It’s an online business planning platform that has an excellent, user-friendly interface to help you create your list of expenses and revenue streams. Once you’ve input all the numbers and information, it will automatically create a balance sheet, a profit and loss statement, and a cash flow statement.

If you’ve been in business a few years, and are using either Quickbooks online or Xero, you can connect that program directly to LivePlan and pull in your real-time revenue and expenses to then compare against your forecast. This is especially useful to see where you may have increased expenses or decreased revenue and why. The dashboard also pulls in competitive industry data from Vertical IQ so you can see how your business is performing vs. competitors in your industry.

I’ve written an article that lists 10 Steps to Create a Blueprint for Growth. This is the perfect time to do this planning for the rest of the year. Click here to get the article.

Writing a Business Plan - Part 3 of a 4-Part Series

 Developing Your Strategies and Actions Plans

By Jeri T. Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist

For many clients, crafting their Strategies and Actions can be challenging. Sometimes it’s difficult to wrap your mind around how they fit into the business plan. The Vision, Mission, Values, and Objectives (goals) are pretty straight forward. The Strategies and Actions perhaps less so. But these are critically important to helping you actually achieve the objectives.

Strategies and Actions Connect the Dots

Think of your strategies and actions as the tasks you need to achieve by a certain date in order to complete an objective.

For example, let’s imagine you’re planning an event for a year from now. The objective might be: “raise $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025.”

To do this, you have several tasks that must be accomplished before the event takes place. Here are just a few things that have to happen:
1.    Select a location
2.    Determine the event theme
3.    Create a budget
4.    If there’s a silent auction, select items to auction
5.    If there’s a live auction, choose the auctioneer
6.    Select entertainment
7.    Choose a caterer
8.    Create and send invitations

Those 8 items are the strategies to be accomplished for the objective of raising $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025. Each strategy has its own due dates and set of actions that must be accomplished before that strategy is complete. As you start assigning due dates to the strategies, you may see that in order to accomplish one strategy, a prior one must be completed.

For example, selecting a location may require site visits to meet with the event director. The location may be a hotel or a clubhouse or a unique location like a museum or golf course. Until you identify the location and the cost to hold your event there, you can’t complete your budget, the third strategy on your list.

The same holds true for the event theme. That strategy may require a committee meeting to brainstorm ideas and research the costs associated with creating the ambiance you want – colors, decorations, attendee gifts, etc. Those costs will be added to the budget as part of the overall expense for producing the event.

Once you’ve determined all the costs associated with producing the event, you may find it necessary to offset those costs with sponsors. Even those have costs associated with them since sponsors expect special treatment such as free tickets, free drinks, gifts, etc. You will need to create different sponsorship levels with their own set of recognition and gifts depending on the amount of money being donated. In this situation, you have another set of strategies and actions tied to finding and securing sponsors.

All of these activities are the tasks that need to be accomplished in order to achieve the objective of raising $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025. These actions with their respective due dates drive your daily activities leading up to the event. They connect the dots between where you are today (planning the fundraiser) and achieving the end goal of raising $50,000.

If we continue with the same 1-3 year horizon we’ve used for the prior two blog articles, then you write your strategies as follows:

• Business building objective to accomplish by a future date, plus
• 8-10 strategies that describe how that objective will be done.
• Under each strategy are specific actions or tasks that must be completed to achieve that strategy.

Let’s use the fundraiser example from above.

The objective is to raise $50,000 via a fundraiser event by August 31, 2025

Strategy 1 is to find a location by September 30, 2024. The actions to accomplish that are:
•    Research venues
•    Make site visits to meet with event directors
•    Determine costs associated with preferred venue
•    Choose the best venue and date availability

Strategy 2 is to determine the event theme by October 31, 2024 Those actions might include:
•    Gather a committee to brainstorm themes
•    Choose colors, décor, and theme images
•    Determine costs associated with theme elements

Strategy 3 is to create an event budget by November 30, 2024. The actions tied to that might include:
•    Check with manager re budget allowance
•    List all costs associated with producing the event
•    Determine if sponsors/underwriters are needed
•    Determine ticket price and minimum attendance to cover costs
•    Set fundraising goals for auctions to offset event costs
•    Create an interim budget showing expenses, revenue, and potential net profit

That gives you an idea of how to write the strategies and actions (Part D on the template) to connect the dots between your current state (Part C) and your desired state (Part A) also known as your future vision.

If this scenario were real, you would include additional strategies and actions to carry you through the event, including a follow-up debrief that covers what went well, what didn’t, and whether or not you pulled off the event at or under budget.

If you have questions about crafting these, feel free to use this link to schedule a 15-to-30-minute no-obligation call.

Writing a Business Plan - Part 2 of a 4-Part Series

 Considerations When Writing Your Business Plan:
Crafting Effective Objectives and Values

By Jeri T. Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist

Once you have created your Vision and Mission statements, it’s time to set your future objectives. These are the goals or targets you want to reach at some future date, usually in 3-5 years.

For this purpose, let’s use the same time window of 1 to 3 years as we did in Part 1, crafting your vision and mission statements. This is more appropriate for small businesses and departments within larger organizations. Those larger, well-established businesses may look at 5-to-10-year time horizons.

You’ll recall that in our coaching and training practice, we adopted the Systems Thinking Approach® to strategic and business planning from The Haines Centre for Strategic Management. This approach uses 5 simple questions to craft a strategic or business plan. Below are the 5 Systems Thinking Questions and the areas they cover.

1.    Where do we want to be at some future date? (Your Desired State)

a.    Vision
b.    Mission
c.    Values
d.   Unique positioning or selling proposition

2.    How will we know when we get there? (Feedback Loop) Quadruple bottom line goals:

a.    Annual revenue
b.    Customer numbers and satisfaction
c.    Employee numbers and satisfaction
d.    Community engagement/support (giving back)

3.    Where are we today?

a.    Current State SWOT
b.    Strengths
c.    Weaknesses
d.    Opportunities
e.    Threats

4.    How will we get there?

a.    Connect the dots from current state to desired state (vision)
b.    4-5 key strategies
c.    At least 3 actions under each strategy

5.    What may be different in our external world that could affect our plan? External scan of 8 areas
        (What we call the SKEPTIC)

a.    Society (demographic changes in the marketplace)
b.    K competition
c.    Economy (local, regional, national, etc.) or Ecology (going green)
d.    Political (may not apply)
e.    Technology (software, social media, digital trends)
f.    Industry
g.    Customer (changes in buyer behavior)

For this article, we’ll focus on the question: How will we know when we get there? This focuses on the Quadruple Bottom Line of:

a.    Financial: Sales/Annual revenue
b.    Customer: new and repeat, satisfaction, quality, units sold/customer/Online & Offline
c.    Employee: numbers, skills & capacity, satisfaction
d.    Community: engagement/support (giving back)

The One-Page Business Plan Book by Jim Horan lists these a bit differently for a small business:

a.  Financial:
        Sales/Annual revenue, profitability, expenses, assets, liabilities, owner compensation
b.  Customer:
        New and repeat, average sale, units sold/customer, quality
c.  Learning & Growth:
        Output/employee, skills & capacity, resource utilization, achievement, waste reduction
d.  Process Improvement:
        Marketing & sales, manufacturing & operations, finance, HR, legal, management &
        decision-making, technology/innovations

For marketing, sales, and personal staff goals, the objectives are different:

a.    Marketing: contacts/ appointments/ presentations/closes/articles/speaking/events, and other       
       marketing activities to track and measure
b.    Sales: revenue/month, product sales, program/project sales, professional service sales, average
       sale value, revenue per client, average billable hours
c.    Personal/Well-Being: exercise, weight, vacation, free time, community involvement,     
       personal net worth

You choose the approach that works best for you and your organization. Then structure the objectives under each category using a format similar to the one below:

Grow, increase, or achieve (sales, new customers, website traffic, etc.) of _________________ (#,$,%) by (future date) _______________.

The date is the same future date you used for your Vision and Mission statements, so that may be 1, 2, or 3 years from now. You may have multiple staggered objectives to show an increase or decrease each year.

In The One Page Business Plan book, the Values are covered to some degree in the questions you answer when crafting your Vision statement. We believe these are important to state separately since they express the culture you want to create in your business, internally with your employees, and externally with your customers and suppliers. This is the behavior you wish to engender. Or in other words, “it's how we do things around here.”

One advantage of having a business plan is that you can be flexible in your approach, choosing the objectives that are most applicable to you at the time you write it.

If the culture in your organization is something that needs to change, creating a separate set of values and stating them as objectives may be an approach to take for year 1 or 2. Those might be stated as follows:

To create an internal culture of mutual respect and servant leadership that honors the talents and passions of each team member by _________ (future date).

To empower team members to serve our customers with dignity and respect, making their needs and wants a top priority by ___________ (future date).

In the above examples, you need to include key strategies and actions that support your values objectives to achieve those culture changes. Those actions need to include ongoing tracking mechanisms to ensure the behavior change occurs, is rewarded, and your team is motivated to continue the new behavior. Without a genuine cultural tracking and reward system in place, people go back to doing business as usual and the change you wanted to create does not take place.

Once written, the business plan becomes a living document that should be reviewed and updated yearly, celebrating any successes you and your team have accomplished during the year since the plan was first drafted.

Next up: Crafting Your Strategies and Actions

Writing a Business Plan - Part 1 of a 4-Part Series

 Crafting Effective Vision and Mission Statements

By Jeri T Denniston, Chief Markteting Stratgist

Do you find crafting a vision statement for your small business or department a challenging exercise? Many clients I work with find this one of the most difficult aspects of writing a business plan. Part of the reason is that it addresses the concept of WHY. Why we are in business and Why our clients or customers choose us rather than our competitors. The vision also encompasses the future strategic desired state we want to achieve in perhaps 1 to 3 years, a concept that is difficult for many to imagine. If we haven’t given much thought to what we want to accomplish 6 months from now, how can we imagine something that’s 12 months or farther in the future?

I am using a time window of 1 to 3 years here intended for small, young businesses. Larger, well-established businesses have these struggles too, and they may look at 5 to 10-year time windows.

We usually have a good idea of our mission. It’s based on what problem we solve for our customers, what we do, and who we serve. Although, even the “who we serve” can be a concept many entrepreneurs struggle with. Some say it’s everyone, especially if they offer products and/or services that serve several demographics. But when you begin to analyze WHO is your best customer, you begin to form a demographic profile of the primary decision-maker. That person is your primary target customer and your marketing needs to address that person’s primary needs and reasons for choosing you. Your marketing strategies also need to address what makes your business unique in that customer’s eyes that causes them to choose you. Understanding your WHY helps to address these areas.

But I digress. Let’s get back to the vision and mission statements.

Recently, I’ve started working with clients using Jim Horan’s The One Page Business Plan for the Creative Entrepreneur. Initially, I found the vision and mission statements somewhat out of sync with the Systems Thinking Approach® we adopted from The Haines Centre for Strategic Management. However, I see now that the vision statement may be more easily attainable for solopreneurs, small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, and even small departments within larger organizations.

The vision statement in Horan’s book incorporates strategic growth goals that include geographic scope, revenue, customer, and employees as well as the ideal customer’s needs and which products or services address those needs. Below is one example.

Within the next 3 years grow East Way Yoga into a $10 million Northern California provider of on-site workplace yoga classes, inspiring companies and their employees to create a satisfying and fulfilling work/life experience by transforming their moment-to-moment awareness. We will also create and sell new yoga-related DVDs, locally and online, to support the ongoing practice of living life more fully through yoga.

Wow! That first sentence is a mouthful! But it incorporates all the key components. Using a Systems Thinking Approach®, we might boil that down to the following statement listing the revenue goal as one of the strategic measures that answer the question, “How will I know when I get there?” (The vision statement addresses the question, “Where do I want to be at some future date?”) The what and how are addressed in the mission statement from a systems thinking perspective.

Within the next 3 years grow East Way Yoga into a Northern California provider of on-site workplace yoga classes, inspiring companies and their employees to live life more fully through yoga.

The Mission Statement

The mission statement in Horan’s book addresses more of Why the business exists rather than What the business does. It also addresses the ideal customer’s needs and how the business solves those needs. One of the exercises incorporates a detailed description of the ideal customer, basically filling out a Buyer Persona with demographic details of age, education, ethnicity, sex, income, etc. Another covers more detail about why the ideal customer buys or uses your product or service, what passion you are trying to satisfy in building the business, the beliefs that drive you, the values that drive your behavior, the highest good that will be achieved, and who will benefit. That’s a lot to cover in a mission statement.

In the Systems Thinking Approach®, the mission describes what we do, who we serve, and how we run the business; the values are considered separate from the mission and equally important because they drive behavior in the company. The values create the culture.

Horan’s book uses a series of questions that help to drive your thinking when crafting both the vision and the mission statements. I’ve copied them below and turned them into a separate document that my clients can download and use. Having worked in the journalism field in the past, I especially like the way he categorizes the questions for the vision statement. In journalism, the who, what, where, how, and why are the main aspects of writing a story and, in particular, crafting the lede paragraph in 30 words or less. 😊

Vision Statement questions:

WHAT
1.    Services or products? Or both? How many?
2.    Company image: what will this company be known for?
3.    Owner’s role: what is your role? How will you spend your time?

WHERE
1.    Company: local, regional, national, or international?
2.    Clients/Recipients: where are they? What cities, states, countries?
3.    Business Operations: Headquarters, offices, program locations, etc.?

WHO
1.    Customers: What are they? What needs do they have?
2.    Staff: Who needs to be on your team?
3.    Strategic Alliances: Who can you partner with?
4.    Advisors: Who can provide professional and strategic advice to help you grow this business properly?

WHEN
1.    Start-Up: When will this business be operational?
2.    Facilities: When will office/manufacturing/distribution space be required?
3.    Systems: When must they be selected, tested, and operational?

WHY
1.    Owner: Why am I creating this business?
2.    Customers/Clients: Why will they buy these products or services?
3.    Investors/Bankers: Why will they fund this business?

HOW
1.    Funding How will this business be funded?
2.    Culture: How do I want to interact with customers, employees, vendors?
3.    Personal Beliefs: How will your personal beliefs impact this business?

The Mission addresses the following questions:
•    Why does this business exist?
•    What are we committed to providing to our customers?
•    What promise are we making to our clients and customers?
•    What wants, needs, desires, pain, or problems do our products and services solve?
•    What is our unique selling proposition?

Each section of the book includes examples of vision and mission statements which may be helpful as you start to craft your own. The mission statement section includes a simple formula for writing a mission statement:

The ideal customer description + goal/benefit of your products or services

In both sections, the objective is to write a statement of between 35-50 words that addresses the questions in each section. This may take several iterations to come up with the final vision and mission statements you like. Using AI tools such as Google Gemini, Microsoft Bing or ChatGPT may help you make the statements more succinct once you have written your initial drafts. When you do have statements you like, share them with your business colleagues and/or advisors to get feedback. Sometimes, having a second or third set of eyes can help to clarify your thinking.

Ultimately, it’s a process and an exercise you should review yearly to address any carefully considered and necessary adjustments based on changes in outside areas such as the economy, your marketplace, your industry, or customer behavior.

If you want a copy of the vision and mission questions document, click here.

10 Ways to Use Social Media to Engage Staff

 By Jeri T. Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist

Takeaways: Social Media is a powerful tool for gaining feedback on initiatives from staff and other stakeholders. Use contests and rewards to engage people in fun ways.

We’ve all heard the maxim: 75% of all strategic plans fail to reach their objectives. The biggest reason is that most leaders fail to engage their staff consistently in executing the strategies that support the organization’s goals. Planning is the easy part. Execution and consistent follow-up are where most fall short.

Getting feedback from mid-level managers and staff and their buy-in to support organization-wide initiatives becomes more complicated the larger the organization. How do you effectively communicate the vision, mission, values and goals in a way that is fun and interesting? How do you engage the hearts and minds of your people while supporting their own individual needs to learn, grow and succeed? How can you share strategic goals and make them fun at the same time?

Managed properly, social media can offer powerful tools for communication and feedback.  Here are 10 ways you can use social media in your organization to share the strategic plan, get feedback from staff and other stakeholders, and keep them engaged in supporting the company initiatives.

1 Create a Private Facebook Group. Use this group to share images, videos, links and documents among staff and key stakeholders. You can upload documents, hold contests, share videos and pictures all within an invitation-only group. Use your public Facebook page to hold contests and surveys, and showcase products and events. 

2 Hold Private Chats. Use Google or Zoom Chats for planned and impromptu virtual meetings to share ideas, conduct surveys, and gain feedback. Encourage staff to meet via Google or Zoom Chat to share projects, ideas, and progress towards goals.

3 Set Up a Corporate Wiki or Blog. Create a Wiki or a Blog that staff and key stakeholders can edit and add to for the purpose of gathering information about a specific topic or initiative. Assign usernames and passwords to control access and track participation.

4 Hold Contests to Generate Ideas. Hold periodic contests that you promote on your Facebook page or announce via Google or Zoom Chats or Slack. Reward staff for finding ways to cut costs or for sharing unique ways they’ve supported key initiatives.

5 Announce Success. Use Facebook, Instagram, or an internal messaging app like Slack, to announce successes. Post staff and organization wins with links to a landing page for more details about the success. This shows appreciation for staff achievements and customer support, and recognizes those who are supporting the organization’s values and goals.

6 Hold Facebook and LinkedIn Live Events. Invite customers and the public to hear from company executives about key strategies and initiatives, and to gain feedback. Use these to take the pulse of the market before product launches and while doing market research.

7 Use Pinterest to Showcase Products. Create boards on Pinterest to promote and sell new and re-packaged products. Encourage staff to share with their friends and followers through contests.

8 Create a Facebook Business Page. Ask customers and staff to write reviews on your Facebook page and share feedback about specific products or key company initiatives. Send periodic surveys to customers asking them to post responses on your Facebook page. 

9 Share your Strategic Plan. Put your plan on your website or create a slide deck that can be viewed online using Google Slides, Canva, Prezi, or PowerPoint. Post updates about your strategic plan on Facebook and Slack, and invite comments and feedback from staff, the public, your customers, and vendors. Create a contest and reward system to encourage their engagement.

10 Create Videos and Podcasts. Have senior executives and managers share updates via videos and podcasts you host on Vimeo, YouTube, or your own internal network. Encourage people to subscribe to get regular updates. Make these fun and engaging using animation, music, and contests.

Bonus: Create a LinkedIn Business Page. Engage senior executives to post the progress their divisions are making on key initiatives and to showcase star performers. 

Strategic Planning Can Be Simple; But It Does Take Work

Simple, easy, straightforward.

You’re a small business owner, and in today’s economy, your biggest concern is either how to grow or keeping the doors open. It’s the age-old question: How do you get more customers or clients to come to you?

More clients mean more sales, which results in more cash infusion into the business, so you can make payroll, pay the electric bill, etc. You’re competing in a difficult economy where people are holding on to what little cash they have. And you’re competing on a global scale, like it or not. But not everyone is suffering. Some businesses are thriving despite the economic situation. Why them and not you?

Perhaps the businesses which are doing well have taken the time upfront to identify a niche that isn’t being served and that they can serve extremely well. Chances are the leaders have put a plan on paper that guides the strategies they’re pursuing to succeed in today’s world. 

No Time to Plan

But, you say, you don’t have time to make a plan, right? Perhaps you don’t, but it’s the wrong conclusion! If you don’t have a plan for your business, written down as a roadmap for your future, how do you know you’re pursuing the right things? You and your team could be spinning their wheels pursuing the latest great idea someone had for a way to generate sales, but it may not be the right great idea. The great story-teller, Lewis Carroll, of Alice in Wonderland fame said: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” And it’s so true.

Think about it. If you need to visit a client site, and you’re never been there before, do you just get in your car and drive? No. You find a map, on the internet or in a book of maps, or you punch the address into the GPS navigation system of your car to guide you to the destination. You need to know WHERE you’re headed to figure out HOW to get there.

A strategic plan that lays out that road map to your future destination, how you measure your progress toward it, and the strategies you need to pursue to get you there, is crucial if you want to create long term sustainability. It doesn’t have to be difficult, lengthy and time consuming. You can put the essential information down on one page, in one day, and have the start of plan that will guide your company’s future growth and development. Just answer the following five questions:

A    Where do I want to be? (at some point in the future)
B    How will I know I am staying on track?
C    Where am I today? (What are my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?)
D    How will I get there? (What 3-to-5 strategies do I need to implement to close the gap to A?)
E    Ongoing, keep asking: What might happen in my future environment that could affect my plan today?

Once that is done, communicate it to your staff and set them loose developing their own key actions and strategies to support that future destination. However, insist those actions are aligned with your strategies. That way everyone is on the same page, working towards the same goals, but using different tactics to get there. The path won’t be straight, and there will be deviations along the way because circumstances change, and the world will intervene to cause you to make some corrections, but if you keep your eye on the future goal(s), you will eventually reach that objective.

And if you need help along the way, contact us. We are passionate about helping business leaders create and implement solid, simple and effective plans to grow their businesses.  

Discover Hidden Costs in Your Business

 Are you focusing on the wrong things?

By Eric A. Denniston, Managing Director

Many companies respond to slow growth cycles with a knee-jerk reaction of cutting jobs as well as budgets. While this may be necessary, too often what has happened is that executive management first looks at the highest paid employees and offers them an early retirement package. They also look at advertising, training, and marketing budgets to see where else to trim expenses. Then they move to the next level of salaried managers and eliminate them.

As a result, these firms face a lack of bench strength in terms of middle managers who know the business and can quickly help the company get back on its feet as the economy turns around. There may be a wide gap between the staff and the executive team that are left, creating a serious leadership void when retaining talent for the next upturn could be critical. Consequently, morale may plummet, with those who are left waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering how safe their jobs are. This prevents them from focusing on their work which is crucial to helping the company progress.

What can be done to turn this around? You can focus on employee culture and look for ways to empower your staff to take an ownership view of their jobs. It can’t be simply mandated, people need to understand how their work contributes to the organization’s success. There are creative ways to reward your people for helping to find even more ways to eliminate bureaucratic waste – without cutting jobs or paying out bonuses in cash.

Cut Unnecessary Processes

Look at the processes in your business. Are they all necessary? Are you doing things because they’ve always been done that way? Or are there opportunities to change or eliminate some processes altogether because they’ve become outdated or irrelevant? It’s time to take a hard look at where you might uncover some hidden costs and discover new-found savings.

For example, is it really necessary for every person, manager or department to have their own printer? What would be the cost savings if you networked a few printers instead? In addition to the cost savings in having fewer printers to support, the exercise each manager would get by walking from his/her office to the printer and back would be beneficial giving them a short respite from their work and an opportunity to talk to their staffs.

If you use color printers in your organization, did you know there’s a simple, inexpensive, solution for most printers that will force the printer to print in black and white instead of color and to print two-sided instead of single-sided? How much could you save in paper and ink on an annual basis by installing that device on all your color printers?

Those are just two of the creative ideas participants have gotten from attending a two-day workshop we led. Some participants found as much as $2.5 million in cost savings annually!

Impressive results!

While it may be possible to organize this process internally, a key benefit to bringing in an outside, independent facilitator who can coach and guide the process, is the person guiding the process only has a stake in positive outcomes, not political or selfish gains. The results are most impressive when a cross-section of your staff (between 25 and 30 at a time), from senior executives to the lowest level person, participate in a two-day, offsite retreat.

During the two days, each person works individually and in cross functional teams of two or three to look critically at the work they do every day and write down non-essential tasks they perform that could be done differently or could be eliminated or transferred to another department where it makes more sense.

The consultants establish a safe environment that encourages creative thinking and rewards cost savings suggestions. Executive management is required to immediately approve, decline or request more information on each suggestion participants make. Every client who has done this has averaged $40,000 per person in immediate cost savings, without eliminating jobs or adding any new investments in equipment, software, etc.

Total annual cost savings are averaging more than $1 million per company and sometimes much more. Plus, morale has improved. People feel valued. Their contributions are being heard and rewarded, and the long term benefit is a shift in culture from one of entitlement or fear to one of ownership and accountability.

Now may be the right time to try something radically different. What have you got to lose?

Prepare for a Career in Strategic Planning

 By Eric A. Denniston, Managing Director

Takeaways: A strategic planning career defined. A possible career path to plan for. What size organizations to seek work in. Valuable certifications to obtain and keep

Are you already planning to have a career, or switch your career in the direction of Strategic Planning? Make sure you ask yourself what long term outcomes you are looking for and once you are in that career, what becomes possible for you. If you are just beginning to pursue a professional career, ask yourself, what is it about Strategic Planning that spins your jets and what will cause you to pursue such a career with focus, vigor and tenacity. In either case, also make sure you talk to people who are in this career, either as internal practitioners or as consultants and executives who hire these people.

Having an undergraduate degree is a basic place to start if you are planning such a career after or soon after finishing high school. A business degree is more likely to lead to work that is best suited to gaining experience you will need; however, social and engineering sciences can also be very beneficial. This is true because strategic planning in fact requires multi-disciplinary skills.

Becoming effective as a planner involving strategy requires significant experience in tactical activities, and getting to know at least one organization of a few hundred employees or more extremely well. This can be accomplished by working in a number of different areas of a company, or a similar company in the same industry, say banking, manufacturing or insurance. Understanding how all those departments interact will lead to good insight for leading planning activities later on. Typical roles that will enhance your career include being a project leader or a department manager, and getting involved in process improvement.

Build Your Skills With Practice

Along the way, skill building will come through practice; and finding mentors, both inside and outside your company, will help immeasurably as well. You should also pursue general and specific education opportunities. A master’s degree in management is a good choice, if possible focused on strategic management, which is a growing area of discipline. You should also become certified in one or more of the following: Strategic Planning and Management (ASP), Project Management (PMI), Business Analysis (IIBA) and Enterprise Architecture (TOGAF). Each of these certifications leads their respective areas of discipline. Going through the training provided for each one will expose you to materials, knowledge and thought leaders that will give your career opportunities a substantial boost. Obtaining and keeping these certifications requires an ongoing commitment. Staying certified demonstrates to others your level of commitment to being among the best in the business.

Larger organizations provide amazingly rich platforms for working at and practicing the different disciplines that lead to being an effective strategic planner. The variety of challenges and problems that occur produce a rich environment for considering how tactical and strategic solutions can be applied to overcome them, and when to use both. Understanding how these complex living systems function and how their various parts interact is key to developing the insights necessary to succeed.

As your career progresses, seek more and more involvement in planning, whether it is department budgets, or planning and leading projects. Understanding the roles different levels of management have in planning will lead to deeper involvement as you prove your skills. Seeking leadership roles in higher and higher level strategic planning initiatives will help as well. Eventually, you may lead the strategic planning or strategic management team, or move on to Change Architecture, which is a natural extension of Strategic Planning and Management.

What’s exciting about work in strategic planning is seeing the broad view of a business while helping to create and execute successful long term plans, and the sense of value that comes from assisting large numbers of people to jointly reach shared goals. This occurs in organizations of all sizes. Job titles include Strategic Planning Manager, Chief Strategy Officer, Program Manager, Portfolio Director and Change Architect. These are all valuable and growing areas of management in organizations worldwide. 

Global firms present even more challenges generally rooted in the cultural aspects of managing strategy. If you wish to pursue a global career, mastering a second language and spending time in a culture to know it well is a sure way to both enhance your career and your life in general. Gaining a masters’ degree in Global Management is also a plus.