Guide your growth: Your business will grow, or not, depending on a lot of different factors, including overall economic trends, location, specific market needs, hard work, and other elements. Businesses that plan do it to guide and influence their growth, so that they move proactively towards defined objectives rather than just reacting to business events.
Manage priorities: Strategy is focus. Allocate resources where they will do the most good. Work towards your strengths and away from your weaknesses. Develop the company by doing the most important things, according to your long-term objectives.
Assign responsibilities: A plan gives you a place to develop organizational responsibilities.
Track progress: Think of a plan as a business positioning device. With a plan, you can track your progress towards goals, measure results, and manage the business. Without a plan, how do you tell whether or not you are moving in the right direction. What do you measure against?
Plan for cash: Profits are not cash, and cash is not intuitive. You spend cash, you don’t spend profits. However, businesses don’t plan well for cash, and they need to. That may not sound strategic, but it is. It is also the core of an operations plan, and an annual plan. Whatever else, you have to plan for cash.
Main elements
Regardless of the name you use, annual plan or operational plan, the vast majority of these plans include some or all of the following main points:
Focus on main priorities: Planning assigns priorities. Of the whole range of possible market segments, and the whole range of services and possible sales and marketing activities, which are your main priorities?
Specific responsibilities, activities, deadlines, and budgets: We call these Milestones. They are the bricks and mortar of business planning, critical to business success.
Financial plan: One of the most important gains