Business Plans

Have you got a business plan? Do you know what purpose it will serve your business? Have you talked to your accountant/advisor about helping you to prepare a business plan? This is the facilitation role that accountants/advisors could perform. The main group of people involved in a business planning process are you and your team and your accountant/advisor is there to facilitate, ask the questions, record what you’re saying and try to get feedback from you and your team as to what they perceive should be happening within your business.

ESS BIZTOOLS and ESS Small Business have developed material that accountants/advisors can utilise to be able to fully discuss with you all aspects of your business. This can be encompassed with forms, articles, briefing documents and questionnaires, to assist in understanding what your aims are in your business.

This is a very important process because, if you have a business plan, you can then measure your actual performance every month, quarter, six months and, indeed, every year, to see how you’re going to see, if you’re on target. If you get behind what your plan indicated that you were going to achieve, perhaps you can then do some fine tuning and catch up.

Alternatively, you could develop a revised strategy for your business plan that takes into account a few things that did go wrong and this is how you’re going to correct it, so this is your new plan for your new journey in the next few years.

Please don’t hesitate to talk to your accountant/advisor on assisting you in the preparation of a business plan. The best document is a written document that also contains an action plan that details who’s supposed to do something, when are they going to do it by and to whom this task has been allocated.

Then follow up at each Board Meeting, Board of Advice Meeting or Management Meeting which, hopefully, your business is conducting on a monthly basis. Each of those meetings should have an agenda item, “Implementation of Business Plan”, that you can refer to, to see who is supposed to have done tasks in the previous month and have they performed those tasks.

The business plan is not only a written document but will also become an implementation document to help you implement the strategies that you have given due consideration to, as part of the business planning process.