But business planning doesn’t have to be a time-consuming ordeal. In just a pair of two to three-hour sessions, you can put together the basics of a business development plan that will invigorate your business for the course of an entire year.

Preparing for Your Business Development Plan

Set aside the time on two separate days for a pair of business planning sessions. (The days don’t have to be consecutive, but should be fairly close in time. You may choose to have your planning sessions as much as a week apart.) If you’re the sort of person who prefers to work in a group, get together with a like-minded friend or two who also runs a small business. You’ll find the brainstorming in these easier with input from other people, and they’ll certainly be more fun as social occasions. Keep your planning group small, though; no more than three people. (The smaller the group, the more each person will contribute.)

Business Development Plan Session 1

  1. Revisit the Vision Statement Your business vision statement is the starting point for any business development planning, as it’s the core of your inspiration and motivation. Do you see yourself having so much business you need to hire help? Trebling your sales? Becoming locally renowned as the best business of your type? Expanding into a franchise operation? Give your imagination free rein. What would you like your business to be like next year? Three years from now? Five years from now? Articulate your business vision for each time period listed above — and write your three business vision statements down. Don’t hesitate to craft a business vision statement that expresses what you truly want your business to be and what you truly want to get out of your business. The vision statement is for you, not for your customers or clients.
  2. Evaluate Your Business This second step of your development plan involves examining the current position of your business. First, the easy part. What are your business’s three best strengths right now? And what are your business’s three areas of weakness? For more on this, you should read How to Do SWOT Analysis for Your Business and this example of a SWOT analysis. Now it gets a little harder; you need to relate these strengths and weaknesses to your vision statement for next year. How will the three strengths you have identified get you closer to where you want to be next year? How will the three weaknesses hold you back? Think about these and/or discuss them and then write down the three aspects of your business that you feel are most important to concentrate on in terms of achieving your vision statement for next year. For instance, suppose my business vision statement is to treble my sales for next year and get my product nationally known. Suppose, too, that my strengths are the attributes of my product (people who use it see it as a superior product), my customer base (the product is well-positioned locally and I do a lot of repeat business), and my distribution system (I have no problems filling orders or having my product delivered to the customers). On the other hand, the weaknesses of my business are that it doesn’t seem to be attracting a large number of new customers, the product doesn’t seem to be known outside of the local area, and my marketing efforts don’t seem to be working. Examining these and comparing them to my vision statement for next year, I wrote down: “Salesforce. PR. Marketing.” Stop here for the first session. That’s enough to mull over for now — and if you go away and do other things, your mind will continue to work on the problem you’ve set it. A good night’s sleep between this and your next business development plan session (or even several!) will make your next session much more productive.

The Action Plan: Business Development Plan Session 2

Now that you know where you want to go, the purpose of this business planning session is to figure out how you’re going to get there, giving you a practical action plan for the next year for your small business. 3. Set Your Priorities In my example in the first session, the three aspects of my business that I thought was most important in terms of achieving my vision statement for next year were all closely related. Yours might not be. Look at the three aspects you’ve selected and rated them from most important to least important. 4. Brainstorm Actions Focus on your top one or two priorities. What can you do to achieve what you want to achieve? Let your mind rove and list all the possible actions you could take, no matter how impractical they seem. (Here’s where having a partner or business planning team will really help; others often come up with ideas that have never occurred to you!) For instance, having set my priorities to marketing and PR, I would brainstorm all the actions I could take to improve my marketing and PR efforts so that I could treble my sales and get my product nationally known. I could:

Set up a website Send press releases regularly Do something unique or outrageous that would get me national coverage Hire a public relations expert Do a marketing plan Do a huge mailing campaign sending people samples of my product Pay to have the name of my business on a blimp Buy ads in national magazines Buy ads on search engines Buy ads on social media such as Facebook and Twitter

This is only a partial list, but you get the idea. The important thing at the brainstorming stage is to record all your ideas without prejudging (and rejecting) any of them. The most far-fetched idea may contain the kernel of a good idea. 5. Organize Your Actions This is the stage of your business development plan where you shape your ideas into an action plan. First, go over your list of actions. Put check marks by ideas you think are good, put question marks by ones you are doubtful about and draw lines through the ones you think are unworkable or silly. Now examine the “good” ideas. Do you see any similarities or themes? If so, group those ideas accordingly. 6. Set Your Goals Use the check marked items and/or groups of themed items to create your action goals. As I say in Goal Setting Is the First Step to Achievement, the secret of successful goal setting is to incorporate both the action you’re going to take and the timeline into your goal. Use the formula of:“I will (specific goal) BY (specific actions I will follow to accomplish the goal) BY (time).” As an example, one of my action goals might be: “I will get my product known nationally BY creating a marketing plan BY (a date three months from now).” Another of my action goals might be: “I will get my product known nationally BY starting an ad campaign on Facebook BY (a date three days from now).” Don’t skip the dates! They’re important both to spur you into action and to give you a basis for evaluating your progress. Create as many action goals as you feel are necessary to accomplish the greater goal of making your vision statement for next year reality. 7. Plan How and When to Evaluate Your Progress You have your action plan now and you’re ready to implement it — but there’s one more thing to do first. If you don’t plan how and when to evaluate your progress now, chances are you’ll never get back to your business development plan. The dates inherent in the goals will help, but you also need to build time for reviewing your progress on your action plan into your timetable. What will work best for you? Will you review your progress on your business plan once a week? Once a month? Every three months? Some people find it very effective to start each day with a business planning session This keeps your goals front and center in your mind. Whichever you choose, pick your dates now and record them with reminders in whatever scheduling system you’re using. Evaluating your progress on your action plan will probably take anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. Once again, doing your business planning with a partner or small group is very beneficial at this stage; one of the things you will do when you evaluate your progress is to assess what’s working and what’s not. It’s always useful to get more input when amending goals (and interesting to see how your partner or group members are doing implementing their own action plans). The second business development plan session ends here. You’ve now chosen your direction over the course of the next year and have forged a specific action plan to take you where you want to go. You’ve even determined how and when you’re going to sit down and evaluate your progress on your plan.

Make It Happen

There’s only one thing left to do — put your action plan into action! Hopefully, these two business development plan sessions have gotten you fired up and ready to start working on making your vision statement happen.