Business Planning important component of business success

CCH’s survey of small businesses identified that business plans were one of the key requirements of small and medium enterprises.

OBT has developed a range of services that business owners can use to develop business plans, without having to spend hundreds of hours creating from scratch the documentation on business planning, as well as the associated staff training to get your team ready.

Business plans are like maps for tourists.

If you haven’t established where your business is going, how are you going to measure progress along the journey over the next year, two years, three years, in seeing how the business actually performs against the plan that you had originally prepared?

Remember, once you’ve prepared your business plan, it then needs to be actioned, therefore one of the key documents is the “action plan”, which identifies what needs to be done by whom and by when, to ensure that your business plan is really implemented as a key document within the business.

This is very interesting because all businesses need to have a business plan and, at this stage, probably less than 20% have one. Plus, there’s huge opportunity at present for companies that aspire to be an Early Stage Innovation Company (ESIC) going to require business plans if they’re going to be successful in raising investment funds from investors.

With ESIC, business planning could offer a double-edged sword.

We all need business plans, including anyone who wants to be considered to be an ESIC so that they can raise capital that they wouldn’t otherwise have been allowed to raise. (From an investor’s point of view, investors receive an attractive tax rebate and they receive an exemption from CGT for nine years.) Those companies also require a business plan so that they can outline their vision, strategies and who is going to be the key people in the implementation of these strategies for the investors to read.