Do you want your business to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios and be as adaptable as possible?

The answer is obvious, especially in the light of the occurrences of the year 2020. Having an annual plan is the clincher to being prepared and adaptable.

Hesitating Will Backfire

Many new business owners are somewhat hesitant to develop an annual plan, being that it may seem like an arduous task that may not be worth the effort. And besides, they have a mental image of where the business is going right?

Well, unfortunately, in most cases, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that image as many variables will affect business operations and consequently distort the image.
The confusion created from the lack of an annual plan will affect all levels of management within the business: investors may be reluctant to fund the business, managers may find it difficult to react to the dynamism of the industry and employees may be unable to properly manage their daily tasks.

You Can Start Small

Having even a wireframe of the future of the business and its operations documented, would go a long way in maintaining unity within the business, and increase its adaptability to changes in the business environment.

As mentioned previously, most business owners are averse to taking the time to sit down and prepare this document. It is perceived as an unscalable mountain, but like with most seemingly insurmountable tasks, breaking the mountain down into a series of smaller, scalable hills, goes a long way in achieving the goal of climbing that mountain.

This analogy works both as a framework for the process of creating the annual plan overall, and the steps or milestones within the annual plan itself.

You Can Start Any Time

If you have been in operations and have not yet developed one, don’t fret. It is as simple as looking back at the performance of your previous years and using that as a basis for building your annual plan for the current or next year. You then bring your end goal from abstraction into a more concise state by properly and clearly stating and writing down your vision, this will allow you to define the smaller milestones that will add up to crystallizing that end goal.

The final step is to collect data from your operations and compare the actual progress to the documented roadmap to measure performance and make necessary adjustments.