All businesses need a business plan to help guide them and ensure that they achieve the targets you set for growing their business. This is particularly important when you are starting your business or if you are planning to expand.

Many people believe that business planning is a complicated process and results in a lengthy document that is never looked at again.  In our view, having a concise business plan that is realistic and easy to understand will help you more. It gives you and your team clarity about what you need to do over the next 3 to 5 years.

Here are seven steps that will help you to formulate a business plan that works for your business.

Define your vision, mission and goals

Having a vision will give your business a clear focus and can stop you from heading in the wrong direction. It should be aspirational and help those looking in understand what your business is trying to achieve. Your mission should be focused on the internal message. How do you want to conduct your business, and how will your team operate daily? Once you have your vision and mission defined, you can set goals for the year ahead.

It’s essential to do market research

Often companies don’t spend enough time doing market research. The more you know about your industry, the market and your competitors, the better. This will help you to make informed decisions about growing your business. For example: identify your target market and what they typically expect to pay and how often they buy. Plus analyse your competitors, especially their strengths and weaknesses.

What’s your operational strategy

Clearly define how the business is structured and how it will operate. Where will it be based, what equipment do you need, how will the products be distributed? If it’s a service, how will client’s access this? If everyone in your business understands what to do and when you achieve consistency and maintain a high-quality service.

Identify the workforce you need

When you start, you may be able to operate the business alone. But over time you may need to either outsource functions or start recruiting employees. By having a clear plan of the roles required and the costs involved, you will be able to grow steadily.

Be clear about your products/services

It is important you define your products/services from the start. The benefit of running your own business is that you can make changes as and when required, however, if you diversify too quickly you may dilute your offering. Identify your best-selling products/services and focus on these to help with cash flow.

It’s important to have a marketing plan

You may have the best product/service in the world, but if no one knows about it, then your business can’t succeed. Think about your business brand and how you want to position yourself in the marketplace. Then evaluate all the traditional and digital marketing tools and decide on the ones which will help you communicate most effectively with your customers.

Create a financial plan and cash flow analysis

This step is usually the last but probably the most important. You need to have all the information from steps 1 to 6 first, so you can create a financial plan which will help you achieve your goals. If you need to access funds or look for an investor, then you need to demonstrate that your business is financially viable. A cash flow analysis helps you identify how much cash is flowing into and out of business at any given time.

We hope you found this article useful; we help lots of businesses to create plans that work for them, especially if they need to look for extra investment. If you would like any advice, then contact us by calling 01623 490 120 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..