Banks like to see your business plan if you’re asking for loan or overdraft facilities – although they’re heavily focused on the numbers. Potential business partners also like to see your plan, whether it’s for the project you’ll be sharing or your full business plan, so they can see where your focus is and whether this project is a critical business cornerstone, part of a bigger plan or an afterthought.
But a business plan doesn’t have to be a 30+ page document. You can do a business plan on one page (although you’ll probably need to work up parts of it to turn it into an action plan).
With a new calendar year just a couple of days away, this is often the time when businesses start to look at their plans for the year ahead. Goal setting takes place – and then, in 3,6 or 12 months you check your progress.
Are you thinking about the year ahead and getting focused on what you’d like the year to be like for your business?
Do you want to grow financially, more staff, bigger premises?
Do you want to earn more, but work less – so you’re looking at ways to generate residual income?
Are you scaling back to give yourself less stress, or more time with family?
A business plan isn’t just about making more money, it’s also about having the lifestyle you want. It’s no good working 14 hour days to make the business successful if you don’t have time to do the things you love with the people you want to spend time with.
Get a big piece of paper or a pad of sticky-notes and jot down all the things that you want from your business in 2026. They don’t have to be in any kind of order at first, just getting them out of your head – regardless of how crazy they may sound – is your aim for now.
When you’ve asked yourself that ‘what do I want my business to achieve in 2026?’ question three times and can’t think of anything else, it’s time to review your ideas and get them into some kind of order.
Maybe prioritise – high, medium, low – and turn them into goal statements. You may be able to amalgamate two or more into a single goal.
Be specific – so not ‘more profitable’, but ‘increase profit by 20%’ (of course, that means you need to know what your current profit is!)
Getting results
The problem is that – you can’t ‘do’ a goal. You need something to aim for, but getting there requires a ‘to do’ list of actions that take you, step-by-step, towards that outcome.
For example, you might say “I want to increase profits by £100K by this time next year.”
Now you’ll need to work out:
- Which product/services and how much of each you need to sell to generate that level of profit
- What the cost of each sale is – including overheads – so you are focused on profit, not turnover
- Whether you want to increase prices, frequency of sale or customer base, or all of these to generate that profit
- What activities you need to do to make more sales – not just ‘maybe’, but guaranteed sales
- How much time these activities will take
- Who will do what – it may not all need to be you, but you will need to create very specific, clear briefs to ensure that the right things are done right!
These details probably won’t be part of the main business plan, but are a critical part of achieving success!
