Michael Van Horn
#4 in the series.
For owners of any kind of small businesses—from 1 to 100 employees. Questions and exercises to help you think through every part of your business.
I recommend you include your co-owners and key managers.
Owners who have a practical plan, and pay attention to it, will more likely succeed—even if there’s a lot of uncertainty. “Plan for what you can, then plan how you’ll deal with the things you can’t plan for.”
I have led annual plan workshops using this workbook for over 30 years, so it’s been tested and refined on thousands of business owners.
Where you want to go, your vision of success, what your exit strategy is, what you must do to get there, what opportunities and problems you will face, and how you’ll deal with them.
Questions to help you think through and plan for every aspect of your business:
• Marketing and sales
• Operations and getting the work done
• Management and administration
• Key people and other employees
• Finances and financial systems
• Revenue—including 8 different ways to project your revenue.
• Profit—including how to calculate needed profit.
• Capital needed for growth, working capital.
• Your paycheck.
• Your spending plan—where you need to spend more, and where to cut costs.
Find the toughest part of achieving your goals: dilemmas, uncertainties, choice points, risk factors. How will you tackle these?
Any plan that ignores these is bound to fail.
Condense all this into a brief, practical plan of action.
If you can’t write your plan on a page or two, you can’t get it done in a year anyway.
From the workbook
Build trust & real relationships.
Turn leads into loyal customers.
Build trust and stay top-of-mind.
