The Three Fundamentals of Business Planning—Do This Before the New Year Arrives!

Are you and your leadership team in the thick of business planning right now? We bet you are. In the blink of an eye, we’ll be celebrating January 1^st, which is why it’s important to make sure you, and any department heads possibly helping with this activity, aren’t wasting a second on any business planning pitfalls.

At MAP, we’ve been coaching clients around business planning since 1960. As we inch into fall, here are a few tips, three “fundamentals” of business planning for the upcoming year.

1. Give the “customer” a seat at the table. Whether you call them clients or customers, make sure their interests are always fully represented in every aspect of planning including the goals you’ll set, the key strategies and tactics, your efforts around execution, and how you’ll continue to solicit and respond to customer/client feedback. Every business plan needs to support the success of your organization, and that depends directly on it remaining customer-centric, or keeping the crosshairs of decision-making on the customer. You do that by building the customer’s interests into the plans you create. Hot tip: For every business-planning meeting you hold, add the line item “Customer/Client Input” to the agenda, forcing everyone to bring the client’s interests into the discussion and planning.
2. Don’t allow one department’s goals to undermine another. In business planning, it’s common for different departments to have goals that unintentionally oppose each other. When this occurs, one department’s success can suffer at the expense of another, a debacle that can have all kinds of negative impacts if not prevented in the first place. When business planning, make sure that while you’re empowering your direct reports to develop their own plans, make sure the lines of communication remain open among department heads and that you, their leader, are watching out for goals that compete with or may undermine one another.
3. Scrutinize new ideas, making sure they’re the right ideas. In business planning, be aware that it’s easy to get caught up in new directions and ideas, whether fundamental in nature or more akin to “chasing shiny objects.” We’ve found that a great way to evaluate any new idea, approach or direction is put it up against your company vision, mission, goals and strategies, then look for alignment. If the new idea is in opposition to any of those core drivers, it’s a no-go. If it supports it, it may be worth pursuing…just make sure, as mentioned in Essential #2, that it doesn’t adversely compete with another department’s planning. (Need help with this? Lean on the MAP Management System™, which does this for you!)

These three “business planning fundamentals” are just three of many that MAP can help you and your leadership team understand through business planning for your organization. The time is now, before the new year is here. For the best executive coaching and most proven business development planning tools and resources on the market, Contact MAP today!