How To Create The Best Yearly Plan For Your Business
Many people don’t believe they need a yearly plan. They believe they know enough about themselves or their businesses to bypass any planning process. Some people can get away with doing this. But, for most, having a plan and updating it on a yearly basis is essential to keep on track.
Included in this post:
Do You Need A Yearly Plan?
Tips for Developing the Best Yearly Plan
Ask Others for Support
Make Sure Your Yearly Plans Are Secure
Do You Need a Yearly Plan?
A yearly plan helps you to focus on what is important. There are too many events and things that happen during the year that we will simply forget about what needs to get done. The plan lets you see what needs allocation of funding. You can see how your expenses are affecting your bottom line.
If you have employees working for you, a yearly plan can help manage them. You can find out what vacations they are planning, and you can ensure that they are scheduled for training that you may require of them.
You can’t account for everything that they may encounter over the course of the year. But, as long as you have the major events on your plan, you can make alternative plans.
When you implement your yearly plan, you solidify the necessary objectives to advance your organization. You and your employees can use it as a roadmap to make sure everyone is on the same page. There are going to be changes, and as the year goes on, you may find some initiatives are no longer relevant. But, overall, a plan is a great tool to help your company.
Without a plan, people and companies tend to flounder. They spend more money than they should, and they start projects that they often don’t complete. They have no way of knowing whether those projects are even going to help the company at all.
It’s difficult to work as a cohesive unit when everyone is off doing whatever they feel like doing. Even if you have a manager who delegates the jobs, without a plan, the manager will also create projects as he or she goes.
A plan doesn’t have to be elaborate nor does it need to be exceptionally long. It can be as informational as listing out dates and tasks. Then, assign people to those tasks.
It is important to get everyone to participate, but once you get an agreement, they need to be held accountable. Business is difficult enough without having some kind of plan or map to guide you in the right direction.
Tips for Developing the Best Yearly Plan
When you set out to plan for the new year, you will need to factor in several components. While your business may not deal with all of them, some of the more common ones are covered here.
The first step is to evaluate the plan that you created for the previous year. Obviously, if you didn’t have one from last year, you can skip this. If you do have one, determine what aspects of that plan worked and which were not as successful. Decide which activities and events you would like to carry over to your current plan and which to scrap. Also, how often did you have to alter your plan and how well did you keep to the allocated budget?
Next, determine if you are going to develop new products or if you are going to strengthen the ones you currently have. If you are a service-based business, you may want to increase some of your offerings. See if the pricing structure you implemented is working and adjust due to such factors like demand and inflation.
Don’t forget to keep yourself and your employees up-to-date on skills. This will always benefit your business. On the other hand, letting skills stagnate could make your business obsolete. This is certainly business or market dependent. But, most businesses will be served well by keeping up with skills.
Make sure you plan for the nurturing of your customers. It’s much easier to keep existing customers happy than it is to find new customers. Existing customers know you and have come to trust you. New customers have no idea about you and will not have that trust developed. They will be skeptical about buying from you initially. By keeping existing customers happy, you reduce the costs needed for customer acquisition.
As you develop your plan, you will come across items and events that will require funding.
Some things you will need to determine are:
Where that money will come from.
Will you raise money from your existing product sales or are you going to come up with a campaign to raise capital?
If you need to raise capital, you may need to implement a much more detailed plan for funders to analyze.
Be sure to research various means of capital as a bank is not the only means to provide money. In fact, crowdfunding is making it easier for smaller businesses to get the needed funding.
Ask Others for Support
When trying to make a plan for your year, hitting up colleagues and other industry experts can be a great help. Why not rely on those who already have done what you’re looking to do?
Another benefit of reaching out is your planning may lead you to opportunities.
When you and your colleagues discuss your plans for the year, there could be some aspect of your plan that they could be looking for their business. For example, if you state that you are expanding into a new product line, your colleagues may tell you they have been looking for that product. When your colleagues discuss their plans, they may trigger something that you were looking for as well.
Some colleagues who may be competitors, may not be as willing to volunteer so readily. But, they still may be able to help you with the planning process itself. If there is some auxiliary activity that your industry needs to handle, they may give you some insight on that. You probably won’t get much unless you ask a lot of questions.
However, your competitors who have confidence in their businesses, won’t have problems giving out information.
If you belong to any trade groups, be sure to review any information that the groups publish. This will include conferences and other events that you’ll want to incorporate into your planning for the year.
These publications also contain advertising which could spark some ideas for your plans. You may see some product ideas that you may be able to use in your own business. It can also be an indicator of what is working. Businesses won’t repeat their ads over and over again if they are not selling. If you see products or companies who are consistently advertising over time, you may want to incorporate advertising into the mix as part of your plan.
Whatever help you decide to use, be aware that the responsibility of the plan rests with you. If someone makes a suggestion about an item on your plan that winds up not working for you, don’t blame that person. First, determine if you implemented everything correctly. Then, make sure that plan item even belongs in your business. Only you know best what your business is about and which components make sense to keep.
Creating yearly plans can help you in knowing what is working and what needs improvement. It’s perfectly fine to make some adjustments, and you will get better the more you do it.
Make Sure Your Yearly Plans are Secure
Competition is more brutal than it’s ever been. It’s a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world in business. This makes it much tougher to keep your business going. Your competitors would love to get a hold of any plans you have for your business. You need to reduce the risk of letting that happen. Hackers can also access sensitive information if you are not careful. Use these tips to keep yourself and your business safe.
Setting up your yearly plan is a crucial part of succeeding in business. It has become quite easy to accomplish with the technologies that exist to handle planning. Cloud technologies make it convenient to access your plan from anywhere. But, it also makes it convenient for anyone else to access those plans as well.
You may think your safe if you use a paper-based planner. But, what happens if it gets lost or stolen? Don’t think that it can’t or doesn’t happen. The first tip is to try and keep any account information off of your plans. It’s annoying to look up this information in various places, such as bills, etc. If you must store your account information electronically, use a flash drive that is secure. Make sure that you would notice right away if it has been stolen and call all the companies where your accounts are compromised.
If you decide to keep much of your planning information on the cloud, make sure it is truly secure. There have been instances by major providers of cloud-based solutions, where information was stolen. The companies assured before the incidents that everything was secured. Nothing is 100% guaranteed to be safe. The only thing you can hope for is that the companies give you ample warning quickly so you can react in time. Don’t rely on these cloud-based solutions to back up your information. They claim to back everything up but what happens if they make a mistake? If you become too reliant on them to take care of this for you, this could spell trouble for you.
Consider keeping all your highly sensitive information in a house safe or somewhere that you can trust will be safe. If you wait until your information is stolen, you could be too late. It’s not worth the risk. Take the proper precautions and be ready for anything.
Thank you for stopping by and supporting the Krafty Planner! Happy Planning!
