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Business Plan Why Doesnt Your Business Plan Consistently Deliver Your Desired Results
| Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith |
Article Overview: Business plans are designed to help achieve the desired results. If this is true, then why do so many businesses fail to have consistent success? Maybe it is time to rethink the solution and take an innovative look as to the real obstacles facing your business.
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Business Plan Why Doesnt Your Business Plan Consistently Deliver Your Desired Results
From small businesses to large corporations, when you render all the challenges and issues facing these organizations, the inability to secure desired results or implementation always float to the top as one of the three key obstacles that prevent business success. As a business owner or management executive, have you ever asked yourself one of these five questions:
1. How do I move from my vision to my desired results?
2. How do I get my employees to perform?
3. How do I recruit new employees with the skills that my company needs?
4. How do I attract new customers or clients?
5. Why can't I consistently achieve my desired results?
All of these questions when rendered down are about implementation. The failure to implement any corporate wide business goal consumes valuable resources specifically time, people and money. These resources may have been already allocated to other initiatives. Effective implementation or execution is what separates the successful companies from the not so successful ones. Many authors from Rick Page in "Hope is not a Strategy" to Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton in "It's Not the Big that Eat the Small, It's the Fast that East the Slow" write about the affects of poor implementation.
Possibly why implementation continues to vex today's businesses is because executives search for an ineffective answer through a business plan instead of a strategic business plan. A recent search using Inventory Overture revealed that searches for business plan were over 200 times as many as for strategic business plan (148,650 vs. 614). From these searches, it suggests that business owners may be looking for the wrong answer.
Why choose a strategic business plan over a business plan? The answer is simple because a strategic business plan defines "Who Does What By When" through the critical success factors and supporting goals that are in alignment with the sales and marketing plans.
The structure of a strategic business plan is all about implementation. Using the ADDIE Plus methodology may help you in your efforts to create an effective strategic business plan.
Assess - The current market conditions, future market conditions and the organization need to be assessed. This evaluation should begin with an overall organizational assessment and may extend to internal and external customers.
Design – After the evaluation, a design is crafted. This design should include the vision, values and mission of the organization and is overall architecture for the plan. Simply, speaking this is the "Big Picture."
Develop – The plan is developed according to the structure of the organization. Smaller plans or pictures such as marketing and sales fit within the overall plan.
Implement - Using specific goal setting and goal achievement, the strategic plan is implemented. At this juncture, who does what by when is identified.
Evaluate – Goal achievement is the mechanism to monitor and evaluate successful implementation.
Plus - Follow-up is the plus to ensure necessary course correction that may again require some new assessments along with design, development, implementation and evaluation. Using the ADDIE+ methodology provides business owners a consistent vehicle from which to create, monitor, evaluate and follow-up on their strategic business plan.
If you truly want to reach that next level of success by bridging the implementation gaps, stop focusing on a business plan and take the time to create a strategic business plan that clearly defines who does what by when.
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About the Author: Leanne Hoagland-Smith RSS for Leanne's articles - Visit Leanne's website Her book, Be the Red Jacket is a no-nonsense and quick read to help discover potential gaps that may be keeping you from your goal to increase sales. The forward is by Evan Carmichael of EvanCarmichael.com Remember if you think you cannot or you think you can either way you are right. (Henry Ford). Sales Coaching Tip: Change your thoughts; improve your results. Click here to visit Leanne's website   Leadership Assessment Business Building Check List Leadership Audit For Business |
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- Hi Simon
If you can finish off the Business Plan and think about your strategic direction or how you are going to use your product to convince people it's a great idea, it will set the foundation for your programming project. You see, when you are looking for funding you will need a Business Plan and Strategic Plan that will convince companies to invest into your new idea.
Has anyone achieved this idea before using another industry besides health and fitness that you know of?
You should also design some mockups as a "preview" for your programming project. This will also help reduce your programming costs as everyone will know exactly what you want if you have detailed mockups already completed including any functionality you require.
Starting mockups for websites and software applications on paper is the best way if you're not a guru in graphic editing software.
New Small Business Topic
- Hello everyone,
I'm on the lookout for new topics to add to my site. We just launched a Franchising section and are planning Human Resources section. Do you have any thoughts for a new section?
Here's a list of what we currently have:
Angel Investors
Branding
Bank Loans
Business Coaching
Business Plan
Franchises (New)
Insurance
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Marketing
Public Relations
Sales
Small Biz Loans
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- this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody.
2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto.
3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book
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Re: Is A Business Plan A Waste Of Time?
- Business Plan or generally work plan (to do list) improves the quality of my work at least 4 times. I have seen the positive results of planning and focus in my online business. And I know from my past experience how uneficient your business can be when you are not doing planning.
So I agree that there is a relationship between entrepreneur success and planning.
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