STRATEGIC PLANNING
DONE RIGHT
an exclusive workshop for clients of
A framework for helping you understand how to create a business plan that is simple, relevant and actionable.
Marco Soares and HSBC have teamed up to deliver a practical and thought-provoking workshop designed for ambitious business owners who recognise the need to plan and would like guidance on how to create a plan that is practical, effective and ready to be implemented with your team.
Strategic Planning Done Right will guide you through the fundamentals that you need to know and understand to create a solid plan for your business.
Better results and less drama?
Business plans don’t have to be dull, boring documents that get forgotten about or confined to the dreaded ‘business planning draw’. Your business plan should be a relevant and exciting roadmap of what you want to achieve and how you are going to get there.
When done right, it can be a powerful tool for both you and your team.
Why do we even need one?
Well, because you don’t have unlimited resources and what you choose to focus on, and more importantly, what you choose not to focus on will determine the progress you make and the results you achieve. It might feel like you need to do everything at once, solve every problem when it arises, embrace every opportunity you find, but you can’t.
As difficult as it may be, you have to prioritise in order to progress!
What will I get from my plan?
An effective strategic planning process should give you and your team the space and time to stop, think and reset. It should help you understand what changes you need to make to your team, business model and functions to help you achieve your goals and targets.
In my view a business plan is an essential tool for making decisions and providing focus.
What can you expect from this workshop?
- Learn a simple, practical step-by-step framework for creating a plan for your business.
- Understand how to assess and improve the effectiveness of your team and functions in the context of your future goals and targets
- Understand the strengths, weaknesses and scalability of your business model and what to do about it
- Learn how to achieve sustainable results by shifting from short-term tactical thinking to long-term strategic thinking
- Discover how to get better traction and team engagement in your business planning by understanding how to involve your team in the delivery of your plan.
Watch my video for more info about the workshop and register your details below
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Strategic Planning Done Right in partnership with HSBC
Where: Chilworth Manor, Chilworth, Southampton
Date: Friday 10th November 2023
Time: 9.00am – 12.00pm
Register your details below
(this workshop is exclusively for business owners, CEOs or MDs)
Is your business plan in your head? Well, if it is, unless you allow your team members to do this to you, it is unlikely to be helpful to them and, therefore, unlikely to be helpful for you.
Let’s talk about documented business plans. What’s the problem with having a plan that is in your head and not written down? First of all, if it’s in your head, that doesn’t mean it’s not real. At the very best, it’s going to be a list of things that you want to achieve in your business. The other problem with having this list in your head is that it is unlikely to be detailed enough, unlikely to be prioritized, and unlikely to be clear. That’s going to make it really difficult for you to be able to communicate to your team members, and it’s going to make it really difficult for you to be able to delegate.
Finally, as you go through the inevitable highs and lows of business and as different things change around you, that list is going to constantly change and evolve. That’s going to make it really frustrating for the people on your team because it’s going to feel like the business doesn’t have a clear focus, doesn’t have a clear understanding of what it’s trying to do, and why.
So, how do you go about doing this? What framework do you need to use? I’ll share the framework that I’ve used with my clients for years, and it’s helped them get brilliant results.
First of all, we need to get the big picture straight. In an ideal world, you’d have three to five-year business goals. These goals would be the key things that you need to achieve in order to make progress toward a vision if you have one for your business, or to be able to deliver the strategy that you might have in place. Even if you don’t have a vision or a strategy, that’s no problem. You just need a top-level understanding of what the business needs to achieve over the next three to five years.
If you’ve got that big picture, what that will help you do is set some context around what the business needs to do in the medium to long term. Next, you need an annual plan. The annual plan has two specific purposes. The first purpose is to set out the key milestones that you need to make progress on, which is aligned to the three to five-year business goals. The second purpose is to help you understand specifically what you need to do to achieve your financial goals over that financial year. It should be one or two pages, it should be in priority order, it should have some specific owners, and it is very top-level.
The final piece of the puzzle is a quarterly execution plan. You should have specific team members allocated to specific tasks and goals. It should have a breakdown of all the things that need to be achieved over the 13 weeks that make up the quarter, and again, it should be in priority order. That document is a much easier document to be able to project manage, and therefore to support you in implementing your business plan.
Now, that framework that I’ve just shared with you is really simple, but it is so powerful if you develop the discipline around following it every single year and every single quarter. So to recap, you need top-level three to five-year business goals, you need an annual plan, and then you have a quarterly execution plan.
And presto, you’ve got a proper framework there that you can use to communicate specifically what the business needs to do, why it needs to do it, and you can get your team members to really support you in delivering the growth objectives for your business.
What do you need to do about your planning framework in your company? What do you need to do to stop keeping things in your head and to get it down so that you can communicate it properly and get your people behind you?