When is a good time, or the right time, to work on a new business plan?
Have one, three and five year business planning cycles come to the end of their useful place in our management toolkit?
We are in a new economic climate, where the pace of change may have made obsolete the established business planning practices. In small or medium sized businesses business plans were anyway at best often irrelevant or at worst simply ignored.
Yet planning is critical to successful organisations if we hope to set goals, manage performance and give employees a sense that they belong to an organisation that knows where it is going.
This sense of confident purpose, or absence of the same, is also readily apparent to clients, prospects, suppliers and wider stakeholder community.
So, if owners, leaders and managers fail to show certainty or a common understanding and belief in the key messages they are communicating, internally or externally, the best marketing, processes and plans will not hold up sales and customer relationships.
As the key drivers of change (market economics, technology, regulation, competition and societal changes) continue to impact relentlessly on our businesses the need to update, modify or adapt business plans becomes even more essential. So are quarterly, monthly business plans still the order of the day?
The need for these business plans to be live and lived, understood by everyone involved in an organisation, is more important than ever. The need to be able to quickly plan and change plans will determine who wins in a world where you have the choice to be quick or dead.
There is a clear need to accelerate growth with a new approach to business planning. Success will depend more than ever on leadership in the implementation of these plans. Individual leaders, or leadership teams, need to develop more effective behaviours.
To find out more about how we are working with clients to create great business plans and win in this new challenging market, contact your local PCA representative or attend one of the evening and lunch time events we are organising around the UK.
