In the course of an ordinary day, most business people rush from meeting to meeting, call to call, and task to task at a frenetic pace.  There simply are not enough hours in a day to do everything that needs to get done.  The here-and-now is both emphatic and demanding.  This relentless focus on the immediate makes it nearly impossible to plan for the future.  Moreover, the future is so vaguely ambiguous. In the present, everything must get done now, but even when current needs have been met, the future remains distant and fuzzy.  Notwithstanding, planning ahead is among a business owner’s most essential responsibilities, and this is the time of year when most companies should take time to look ahead and consider goals for the future.

Indeed, there is a tremendous value in planning.  Planning helps provide guidelines and goals for future decisions.  It also helps managers exercise more control in a situation, establish goals “proactively” and consider contingencies.  Likewise, planning can help quantify goals and establish a means to measure success.  It also ensures that a coherent set of actions are implemented that are consistent with the values and priorities of the leadership and organization.  Planning also helps allocate limited resources like staff, materials, and time in an orderly and systematic manner.  Last but not least, planning each year helps a company take advantage of changes within its industry.  Given that planning is so helpful and necessary, how does one find the time to plan?  And what exactly should annual planning entail?  How complicated does this need to be?

Step 1 – Recognizing the need to plan

Like all problems, the first step is to recognize that there is a problem.  Lack of time to plan is a problem that most companies and managers face and yet is one that often goes unacknowledged.  Planning simply gets pushed off or put on the back-burner until there is a better time.  Unfortunately, a better time seldom arrives for most organizations and companies continue to operate doing the same-old, same-old.  Thus, the first step in long-term planning is to recognize the need to plan.

Step 2 – Making the time to plan

Once it is established that planning is needed, the second step is making time away from short-term and current demands to plan.  Making time to plan is typically the biggest obstacle to planning.   After years of scaling back staff and putting more responsibilities and demands on each employee’s plate, many companies are finding that there is no wiggle room for leaders and managers to step back from the daily load they carry to do any planning.

Leadership and management should discuss ways to “find time” to plan.  That may mean forgoing certain regular tasks or pushing back deadlines on projects to create a block of uninterrupted time.  It is important not to add planning to an already full plate and expect it to get done.  That is just wishful thinking.

Step 3 –Planning

Annual planning is critical to the consistent, healthy growth of any business or department.  There are seven key areas that should be evaluated every year.  They are leadership, management, marketing, selling, operations/customer fulfillment, customer service, and admin/back office.  The first step is to identify key attributes for each area.  For example:

1. Leadership – vision clarity, communication of direction, overall business strategy, clearly defined goals, good accountability structures.
2. Management – effective systems, documented systems, process improvement systems, comprehensive operations manual, efficient dashboards
3. Marketing – effective referral strategy, building a strong brand, direct response promotional tactics, relationship management, PR strategies, leveraging the internet, leveraging social media
4. Selling – documented sales process, strong scripts and selling questions, plan for handling objections, making it easy for customers to buy, closing effectiveness, training
5. Operations/Customer Fulfillment – documented processes, efficiency, quality control, safety, expense control
6. Customer Service – relationship management, quick response, building loyalty, reviews & testimonials, customer satisfaction
7. Admin/Back Office – accounting, reporting, finances, data management, inventory control, technology, infrastructure, technology

These are just suggestions.  Add, delete or change as is appropriate to the business.  Once key areas for each department are identified, each area manager should create a high level SWOT Analysis.  SWOT stands for:

• Strengths – These are current or past year internal areas of strength.
• Weaknesses – These are current or past year internal areas of weakness that need to be improved.
• Opportunities – These are external possibilities on the horizon for the coming year.
• Threats – These are potential external threats to upcoming growth and success.

A SWOT analysis for marketing might look like this:

Then, the next step for each department manager is to set some goals for the coming year. For most businesses, a good target might be to set two or three goals for each area or department.  These goals should be written, specific, measurable goal statements.  Ideally, each goal should be assigned to a person on the team to “Champion” or “Lead”.  These should be vetted with those Champions to ensure that there is agreement and support.

Once goals are set, each manager should determine the specific action steps to take to achieve each goal.  There should also be a deadline for each action step and a person to be responsible for each action step.

Step 4 – Follow Up

Once the planning for each department is done and approved, it should be shared with the rest of the team so that everyone is on the same page. Every quarter, the company should review the plan to ensure that the plan is being implemented and see what progress has been made and whether deadlines are being met.  Keep in mind that a plan is just that.  It is a vision for the course of action.  But it is just that… a plan; not a rigid manifesto.  It is to be expected that goals may change, champions might be reassigned, and action steps may have to be revised or dropped altogether as real business issues arise.  Stay flexible and remember that the idea is have a sense of direction, but there might be many different ways to achieve a goal, and new goals that may surface.

On your mark.  Get set.  Make time.  Plan.

Quote of the Week

“A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.” H. Stanely Judd

© 2014, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.