Five quick ways to kick-start your business planning

Have you been putting off the business planning? You know who you are.

Do you mean to start managing better, but keep getting distracted by fires to put out?

Here are five quick and easy ways to start planning today.

Do SWOT analysis: SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It’s a great way to break out of that planning inertia. It’s especially good when there’s a team involved.

Take an hour or two and jot down bullet points under each of these four categories.

Don’t spend all day, much less all week. A couple of hours should work fine. Don’t argue about what goes where. Don’t criticise contributions. It’s brainstorming.

Just jot down the points and record them. Strategy follows. You can’t help it. You do a SWOT, and strategy follows.

Compare plans to actual sales. Think through what turned out differently and what didn’t, and why.

Soon, you’ll be thinking about your marketing strategy, target markets, marketing messages, customers, channels, packaging, delivery, complaints and competitors.

I’m amazed at how much of business, and the business planning process, pivots around the difference between planned and actual sales.

Stretch yourself: Talk to 10 well-chosen people. Funny how much time goes by for most business owners without really talking even to your customers, much less to a few people who aren’t your customers but could be.

I was shocked the first time I did it. I felt like I talked to customers often, but that’s nothing to what you get when you dedicate time and have a real conversation.

First make a good list. Don’t cheat yourself and talk only to the people you always talk to anyway.

Stretch yourself further and find some people you don’t know, so you get a fresh look.