Write Your Business Plan

Your business plan should map out what you want to do and how you want to do it. While you may know what you want to do, writing it down gives it a finality that you cannot escape from. It gives you a standard of what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it.

Knowing what you want to do is not enough. As time goes by situations will change and your actions may reflect a reaction to the change. When you have things written down, you can reference back to them in times of change and knowing what you set out to do gives you the opportunity to respond to the situation rather than simply react to it.

Your response will be more action oriented and keep you on track to your eventual goal. A reaction may be unwanted actions; however, your response will be coordinated, planned and eventually productive. It will help keep your processes centered around your desired path rather than create deviations. When you start to veer off a tangent, referring to your business plan will hep pull you back to your desired actions.

Having a business plan mapped out will help you communicate your desires to your team. While you are in the same company, remember that your team will consist of individuals with their own set of skills, expertise, dreams and desires. Their motivations and actions will differ slightly from each other. While you share the common desire to exceed and excel for your company, the individual actions may or may not match with your ideas or your timelines. Having a business plan mapped out and communicated will help bring everyone up to speed on the requirements and how and when the outcomes need to be achieved.

Above all your business plan should begin with the core reason for your business. Why are you in the business and why do you do what you do. This will set the stage for the team to follow basic guidelines for the rest of the year. Create a theme for the reason for your business and incorporate that in the foundation of your business plan. This will help people establish a foundation for what they are going to do. People are motivated to do things they believe in. It is the task of the business plan to create the foundation for the beliefs of the team members and motivate them to work for those beliefs.

A sound business plan will help you create a foundation for your business, establish what needs to be done and when, and it will help keep your goals centered and on track.