Ahead of my free webinar next week, I’d like to give you an overview of one of the tools I’ll be taking you through and that I share with my clients. The one-page business plan.
There’s no real right or wrong answer when it comes to how to you make your business plans, or when to set your goals. It really is about personal choice and how you feel about it. Having said that, it’s always a good idea to start with a longer-term goal in mind. Now, that might be a ten-year goal, it might be a one-year goal or even a short-term objective, but the idea of the 30, 60 or 90-day plan is to break down the steps you need to take, into manageable actions, smaller steps. Here’s your one-page business plan from top to bottom.
Mission or vision
What is it you want to achieve in your business by the end of the year, or ten-year period? What gets you to work in the morning, what’s your long-term goal for your business?
Targets
What are the targets you need to hit to help you achieve your mission, vision, goal, and objective?
I refer to the magic number five at this point: More than five targets and you could find yourself swamped by KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), any less than five and your progress will be slower. The key aspect to this is to then consider your activities.
High Pay-Off Activities
The idea of the one-page business plan is to make you think long term and start narrowing down and bringing into focus each step to get you there. Starting with your mission, then your targets and on to your activities. What will then happen is the whole plan turns upside down.
Focusing on doing the things that will move you closer to your objectives will inevitably help you hit targets and achieve your mission.
This is the busy section of your plan, the section where you can write in daily, weekly, monthly activities and those all-important 30, 60 or 90 day reviews.
How do we deliver on those activities?
The plan needs to stay fluid. It needs to be a working document that is reviewed on a regular basis, so we can identify what we’re doing well and what we can improve on. We can make tweaks and identify what needs to be changed. The key aspect here his to create time in our diaries for spending on our high pay-off activities to ensure of their delivery. Not only daily or weekly activities like spending time on social media or having 1:1s with your network, but that 30, 60 or 90 day review of your plan to.
Create your one-page business plan
It’s time to put pen to paper and get planning! Remember, the idea of the one-page business plan is to really get you thinking about those high pay-off activities – what can you do to make sure your targets are met, and your mission achieved?
If you have ‘well considered’ activities, then you can in fact fold the paper in half and just focus on executing those activities because if you deliver those high pay off activities then you should hit those KPI’s and targets that as a result delivers your bigger goal or objective.
As an example, if you know your mission is to sign 12 new clients in a year, do you know what your conversion rate from proposals is? Do you know how many conversations you need to have, to generate that number of proposals? What activity will generate those conversations?
I’m here to support you on your entrepreneurial journey. If you need support to help you truly define what your mission is, or with calculating the numbers in your business that will show you the path to success, please get in touch.
My ‘Mapping Your Business Strategy on One Page’ is held on Eventbrite on 2nd December. During this webinar I will share an overview of TWO one-page tools, including the one-page business plan. Join me for the hour, here: Mapping Your Business Strategy on One Page.
Alongside my Eventbrite webinars, I have a wealth of advice in my free business resources section of my website, and offer a free consultation to help you galvanise your business plans.
I look forward to hearing from you.