It’s nearly the start of a new calendar year and it’s an appropriate time for accountants to be encouraging small/medium enterprise clients to prepare or update their business plans for the forthcoming calendar year. Business plans are like ‘maps for tourists’. If you don’t know where you’re going to go, how will you know when you get there? All members of the team should be involved in the business plan process. It’s important that stakeholders have the courage to express their true feelings and opinions on various items and that the team then works together, on an overall basis, to explore the goals of the stakeholders and try to develop an overall plan. The planning process requires real honesty. Does the review of the goals of the various stakeholders align? All team members should be involved. Business plans shouldn’t be prepared by management and then handed down to the team to implement. SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) should encourage all team members to express their true feelings. Businesses need to ask questions: “Why should I buy from you?” Answer them honestly. Has the team been trained appropriately to deliver the services? Another question businesses should be able to answer is: “Why shouldn’t I buy from someone else?” Team members need to be aware of the benefits of your clients’ businesses. Developing benchmarking is an important part of the business planning process. Businesses need benchmarks just as much as sport persons and sporting teams need benchmarking. The ability to compare their performance to their competitors’ performance is well-known in sport and is just as important in businesses. The key objectives of the business planning process are to clearly describe what the business is all about.

• Why are they in business?
• What do they want to achieve?
• What is the end game for the business?
• What future do they envisage?

The business plan should set measurable objectives to be achieved.

• Key directions for the business
• Key strategies
• Actions to be taken

The business planning process is not complete when the business plan is finalised. In fact, it’s only the very beginning. For the process to function within a business, a monthly review is required for the whole team to check actual performance against what was set in the plan. Is everyone doing what they agreed to do? Is the business heading in the right direction? This is a great time of the year for accountants to talk to clients relative to preparing business plans, either for the 2015 calendar year or in preparation for a proper process, for the preparation of a business plan for the 2015/16 financial year.            

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Episode 012  Business Plans Are Important For Businesses

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