The traditional approach

We mentioned earlier that perhaps only one in 20 businesses have a plan. That still adds up to a large number of companies that conduct some type of planning activity.

In our experience, most of these companies engage in a plan-building activity that usually takes place once a year, at most. They usually do this sometime within the final three months of their fiscal year because they want the information to be up-to-date and relevant for the coming year. Some of them engage a wide variety of managers and employees and take many days or even weeks to collect and analyze the desired information and to construct their final plan.

So what’s wrong with all that? Actually, in our experience, this type of planning event has some strong benefits. For example, it’s a good first step as a training ground for learning the process of planning, which is critical to the business. Additionally, many of these annual planning events collect the right types of information and conduct the planning activity in a thoughtful and logical way.

On the other hand, as countless managers have told us, this is the only time of the year that they “think about where the business is going.” For the rest of the year, they work hard every day “to do the real work.”

If there is a problem with this intense annual activity, then, it is with the infrequency of it. Conducting your planning activity once a year is simply not enough, and we’ll talk about that when we discuss an alternative activity.

The traditional annual activity, however, does provide some training in both collecting the right information and in beginning to build a planning process. So we urge you to take advantage of that training value.

Following is a business plan outline that you can use for this training as well as for the actual analysis of information and the creation of your plan. Just as pilots use checklists to guide them in their activities, so too can you use this outline as your checklist to guide you in your planning activities. There are other useful and effective outlines you might use, but this one has served us well.