A Small Business Plan In One Hour

What if you could produce a business plan in an hour and it could fit on a single page? Does that sound like a plan you would be prepared to invest your time in and use? You wouldn't even have to pay someone to do it for you. Well, this is what I am about to show.

As for just about everything in life, the 80/20 rule applies to business as well. That is, 80% of the benefit of anything comes from 20% of the effort, with the remaining 20% of value coming from an additional 80%. So if you have limited resources, it makes sense to at least to do the 20%. So I will explain how to do that 20%.

Step 1. Your vision

When you start out on any journey, you must have a destination. In business speak, that is your vision. What is yours? To be on the beach only to be interrupted occasionally by a call from your accountant to say how big the last cheque deposited into your account by your business was? Maybe you want to sell it in five years. Perhaps world domination is your goal! Rarely the answer is: "I want my business in five years to be exactly the same as it is now." In fact, I have never heard an owner say that.

Are you still struggling with a vision? Try answering the following questions. Imagine meeting yourself in five years' time at a party. You ask your future self what it you do is. What would your answer be? How would you describe your business?

What would your customers say about your business? How would your peers (your suppliers, your competitors, industry organisations) regard your business? How might your business be recognised? Have you won awards? Will you have created a well known brand in your marketplace? What size would your business be? What would be its profit and turnover? How many employees would you have? Where would you be operating? How would the business operate? What sort of products and services would you offer? Who will be your customers? What will be your involvement in the business? What will be the ownership structure? What benefits will you and your family have received from your business?

No doubt you can think of other questions that would also help you describe your business. Now make sure you write down the answers to these questions.

Step 2. Business status audit

The purpose of documenting where you are today is not to make you feel bad, but to identify the gaps that need to be addressed in your strategy. For each of the dimensions you used to describe your business in five years time, describe how it looks today.

This step is particularly difficult for new businesses as the numbers could be quite small, but for a plan to be effective, we must be honest with ourselves.

Record this in a table with 4 columns:

Key Performance Indicator Today 12 Months 5 Years

The Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is just a summary of the questions we asked above.

Step 3. 12 Monthly objectives

Clearly, our 12 month goals will be somewhere between Today and 5 years. While targets should be realistic, one year change must still be significant. Unless it is significant, there will be no drive to change the current way of doing things, which will result in no change.

Incremental targets over a 12 month period will just result in a business as usual approach.

So make the 12 month target somewhat uncomfortable and challenging, but not so challenging as to be an unrealistic turn-off!

Use the same table as we created above to record the 12 month targets.

Step 4. Strategy development

Come up with a list of strengths for your business. If you feel you don't have many strengths, consider what strengths you would like to have, and what you would need to do to create that strength (for example through some type of education or investment).

For each strength used, this is the equation: Key Strength- e.g. quality of service Strength Exploitation- e.g. promote as premium service to high value customers Goal Achieved- e.g. increased revenue.


Using these four simple steps you can achieve a very sound business plan for your small business.