Conduct Some Team Building By Including Them In Your Business Planning.

The key to developing a successful business is for Business Owners to learn how to leverage their business through developing effective team members. Now, this does require ‘mastering’ several aspects of recruiting, managing and leading people of which one of these is to be as inclusive with your team members as possible.

Including your team members in your business planning for small business process will unleash numerous opportunities and synergies that are available to every business if businesses would just be more inclusive with their team members.

Team members whom are included in your business planning process will feel more appreciated and will contribute more to the business they work in. Additionally, Business Owners do not have to invest nearly anywhere as much time communicating and delegating work with team members if they are included in the business planning process as the team members already understand most of what is required and expected.

Often team members understand more of the detailed requirements for their respective work areas than the business owner does. Therefore these team members can often offer more precise and timely information for developing more effective and timely business planning.

Additionally, when team members are included in any business planning for small business, these team members are more likely to actually focus more on getting the business planning implemented into the business as they have been included in this business planning process as opposed to simply being told by the business owner/manager what to do.

Setting Up A Business Planning System

Business Planning for small business should be another ‘system’ in your business. Overall ‘Business Planning’ should entail the development of the plan, the management of the implementation of the Business planning, the measurement of the results from the business planning and finally the reporting and review of the business planning.

We encourage businesses to see their business planning as a ‘cyclical system’ that needs to be followed to ensure you get ‘systematic consistency’ in your business planning and the review of the implementation of that plan.

Every Business should have at least three and one-year Goals and these are the driving force behind the development of any Business Plan. Notice we said Business Goals and did not say ‘PLAN’. For most small businesses, due to the pace of change in business, we encourage small businesses to only conduct business planning for the next 12 months. Unless you are looking to make some major capital expenditure, such as develop a new building, due to the pace of change in business today, we find that conducting proper business planning for up to 12 months is sufficient for most small businesses.

So you should be getting clear on what are your three and one-year goals in both your personal and business life. These will be your ‘powerhouse’, the driving force behind any future planning and activity in your business.

Now, we need to introduce a Business Planning system that stretches out up to a year.  This will be your ‘Business Planning’ system and it encapsulates a one-year plan, broken down into four-quarterly plans; each quarterly plan is broken down into a monthly plan;  each monthly plan is broken down into weekly plans; and finally each weekly plan is broken down into daily plans. 

Each plan must come with its own set of KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators, which support the achievement of its next level of plan. For example, daily KPI’s support the weekly plan, weekly KPI’s support the monthly plan and so on…

How much time you should ‘Invest’? This is definitely an Investment in your business and your team when Business Planning is done correctly. The amount of time you should invest will vary between different types of business depending on your makeup, such as the number of team, how many levels of management there are, areas of responsibility within your business, to name a few.

This diagram gives you an indication as to the amount of time you should be allocating toward your Business planning. Please make a ‘special note’ that business planning is a ‘daily exercise’ and extrapolates out from there to weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual business planning.

Include Your Team In 90 Day Business Planning, Monthly & Weekly Meetings

Every Business should break down their annual business planning into four – Quarterly (3-month) business planning cycles. So you get your team members together every quarter to review your last quarters performance and plan next quarters developments.

Once you have identified your next quarter’s activities through your business planning, next is to set up Key Performance Indicators – KPI’s in your business to measure, report and review the implementation of the business planning on a weekly and monthly basis to achieve the quarterly plan.

Your key team members whom are responsible for the implementation of the business planning, should be recording and reporting daily, if not weekly KPI’s on the critical areas. This will enable these team members to measure and manage their own performance within the business.

Find Out More About Our LibAbun LivePlan Business Plans…

We have adopted an online Business Planning tool ideal for Small Businesses and it integrates with online accounting software such as Xero and Quickbooks to ‘sync’ your actual accounts into your Business plan to give you accurate data in real time. You can find out more about this tool and how it can benefit you on our LibAbun LivePlan Business Planning page.

You can see how the LibAbun Team have helped hundreds of other Small Business Owners over the years by reviewing our Business Coaching Testimonials in both written or Video formats on our website..