DEVELOPING A SMART, EMPOWERING, ACTIONABLE BUSINESS PLAN TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Smart entrepreneurs and established businesses typically use a great business plan as a well-proven tool aimed at accomplishing 1-3 key objectives:

1. acquire funding from investors, loans from bankers or the SBA, etc,
2. a good way to jack up the multiple if you want to sell the business in the medium term, and/or
3. a team-unifying playbook to maximize the productivity and creativity of employees.

Prospective investors need to be shown a dazzling plan that will stand out from the crowd of other "this will be the next Google/Apple/Netflix/Tesla/Facebook/etc." business plans that are being pitched to them every day. Your/Our task is to craft an impressive plan that does not look like it was created with cheap business planning software templates. Most investors jettison those in their first screening pass.

BUILDING CONFIDENCE FOR BUSINESS FUNDING SOURCES

You might think about this kind of plan like an elaborate marketing piece as its fundamental job is to give prospective investors or bankers confidence they can get a pretty meaty return on their investment... quickly... and with minimal risk. Exactly like you when you put your hard-earned money into ANY investment, backers want to be confident about their startup investments. You grow that confidence by showing:

• you're well invested in your own business. It's more than only an idea,
• you've engaged quality talent like the Big Innovations (BI) team to help develop key portions of your plan,
• you've already assembled a team of talented professionals ready to make it happen. This can also be BI for the growth-oriented thrusts within the business, and
• you've not scrimped on a document that is basically asking strangers to give you huge sums of cash for only the potential of some future reward.

A plan developed on the cheap- like any marketing developed on the cheap- tends to fail at moving its audience to take the desired action. That's not saying you should overspend on a plan... but thinking a total investment of $49-$500 in some business plan software or template will yield millions of dollars in financial backing is mostly fantasy. If entrepreneurs could get massive backing- and thus set themselves up with all of the CEO perks therein- by spending only a small amount of money on some software, the world would be drowning in business plans... and everyone would be a rich CEO rolling in cash.

If you've assembled a good team to be the make-it-happen resources when funded, you can leverage their backgrounds & experience in the investor, banker or buyer pitch. This is much more enticing than asking them to give you the money FIRST... and THEN you'll put together a team later. In the former, you are (also) selling a group of talented professionals (all of their accomplishments, experience, knowledge, etc.) while in the latter you are selling only yourself.

Especially in today's ultra-competitive funding environment, you must be heavily invested in your business to win maximum consideration from funding sources. Again, put yourself in the investor's or banker's shoes. Would you give big money to some stranger who has put next to nothing into their own business? Or would you be more drawn to the entrepreneur who has already invested a good amount of their money... illustrating that they believe in their concept beyond $49, or $500, or even many thousands?

FINANCIAL BACKER PERSPECTIVE
IF ENTREPRENEUR HAS		POTENTIAL INVESTOR SEES
a good amount of their own money at stake		an entrepreneur who NEEDS to see this startup become a successful company
little-to-nothing at risk		no personal stake to keep entrepreneur from pulling the plug once investor funding runs out

If YOU were the investor, banker or buyer, which entrepreneur would you want to back with your own money?

A BUSINESS PLAN MAXIMIZES PRODUCTIVITY & ROI OF YOUR HUMAN RESOURCES

A company that wants to empower its people but also needs to maintain a sense of control will create a plan that does both. That plan can establish the boundaries in line with owner vision of the company, while delegating creative detail flexibility so that all levels of employees can significantly contribute in very rewarding, win:win ways.

A good plan is THE BEST WAY to maximize the ROI potential of your own human resources... to fully unlock everything your people can give you.

The fastest growing companies are not fueled by one (or a few) central brain(s) telling everyone else what to do next. Instead, those at the top lay out a specific target and some broad guidelines on how to get from here to there. If here is "A" and there is "Z," the senior managers are (correctly) working at a strategic level.

They shrewdly leave much of the nitty-gritty of steps "B-to-Y" to the rest of the team. Tapping into the creative brains of the MANY tends to make "B-to-Y" go much better than having a few brains at the top trying to micro-manage that nitty-gritty. The latter inevitably leads to anti-productive bottlenecks which waste both money & time. And because those at the top can't be nitty-gritty experts of EVERY function in a company, their "solutions" will often be less than ideal... but implemented anyway because "they're the boss." Too many of those become band-aids-on-band-aids scenarios... a recipe for underachievement or even eventual failure.

Consider a few examples:

• A general may know more about how to do every bit of the desired functions of their lowest-ranked troops at a battle's front lines. For example, he or she may be better at handling a gun, aiming and firing. He or she may be the superior marksman, extraordinarily skilled in every aspect of what their troops are expected to do. However, if he or she must involve themselves in steps "B-to-Y" during the course of battle- for example, if he or she must personally load each gun, aim them, pull each trigger, etc- no battle can be won. If the goal is to take that next fortification but the general wants to involve him or herself in every function, their forced bottleneck(s) will suppress the advance. If the other side understands that in empowering their troops- even if those troops can't quite load, aim & fire as well as their generals- they'll advance en masse, overcoming the bottlenecked side.

• U.S. President John Kennedy laid out what many saw as an impossible vision of putting a man on the moon in less than 10 years. He didn't follow that up by plugging himself deeply into NASA to work on every nitty-gritty innovation to try to pull it off. Instead, he left that to the talented team of creative people most expert at their individual parts. Thus, the accomplishment did not depend on the President(s) becoming a master of rocketry, space suits, computer systems, all matters related to life support & human safety, logistics, mathematics, propulsion, etc. This empowerment of the team was key to getting that monumental goal realized. Had the President(s) forced himself into every "B-to-Y" function of that effort, the U.S. might still be working on getting to the moon.

If your business competitors are better at leveraging their troop's collective expertise & throughput, you're increasingly at risk of losing your company's battles. If you've hired & cultivated good people, make the most of what they can offer by allowing & encouraging them to contribute their specific expertise & creativity.

Use a quality plan to cast your own moonshot vision and some of the higher-level guidance of how and when you'd like to get there. Then empower the team to work out the nitty-gritty details of how best to make it happen. Everyone will be focused, do their part to the max and you can accomplish bigger objectives and ultimately realize those impossible (possible) dreams. That's how to be great as a company... and a greater company LEADER.

STEP-BY-STEP: CREATING YOUR IDEAL BUSINESS PLAN

BI business plan creation is grounded in the foundation of our powerful, collective brilliance model.

The most effective plans always start at thoroughly understanding customer wants & needs and competitive landscapes.

By using:

• cutting-edge research to get closer to your buyers, you are much more likely to deliver the products & services they will want to purchase.
• shrewd competitor analysis solutions, you can effectively tap into the brilliance of your competitors and incorporate their innovations into your own offerings.

Blended together, this research offers a solid foundation on which to craft a potent plan.

Based upon many years of developing plans with many companies, the optimal plan will include approximately 11 sections. These are briefly conveyed in the following presentation. To move through the slideshow on:

• touchscreen devices: with a finger on the slide, swipe left.
• desktops or laptops: click and hold your mouse pointer on the slide and shift it to the left.

As summarized in those slides, we believe tapping into external resources like BI also plays an important role in producing an optimal plan. Outside talent is not biased, nor locked into the company way of thinking about your markets, products, competitors, the landscape, etc. Good consultants can bring pure objectivity that is otherwise impossible to find with only internal resources. Outsiders will also see your problems & opportunities differently, bringing new ideas to overcoming the former and maximizing the latter. New growth in plans mostly depend upon the additions of some new innovations.

BI experts have DEEP experience in executing the business planning process so that you end up with a very smart plan. Our plans have helped our clients & former employers rapidly achieve all-time revenue & profit records.

A QUALITY PLAN GOES FAR BEYOND DESCRIBING HOW YOUR BUSINESS WILL PROSPER

For tactical business growth elements of the plan- sales, marketing and development (Internet, product, business), BI can help you tap into our deep and diverse subcontractor specialist network yielding better quality and/or money-saving solutions that are likely unknown to your team. This is the stuff referenced in the plan that is actually used in execution: digital and/or print marketing promotions, a killer website, advertising creative, sales & support, virtual salespeople, telesales solutions, multimedia, your own mobile app, direct response and so on.

In short: as soon as the plan is approved, funded and ready to execute, these tactical elements are put into play to fire up the revenue and business-building results... deliverables that go beyond only describing how you intend to grow the business. The tactical tangibles are the impressive elements that actually go out and motivate prospects to buy. And BI can be the horses who do up to all of that work (too), which can prove especially useful when you and/or your managers are already (over)loaded with many operational responsibilities on your plates.

If you are seeking some help creating:

• a smart, winning business plan,
• a visually-stunning Power Point or Apple Keynote presentation for the "road show,"

• an online, narrated presentation (in ANY language) for virtual road shows,
• an elevator video,
• investor deck,
• CD-ROM, DVD, BD, 4K & 8K video,
• help sourcing quality investors and/or pitching your plan to them,
• ANY of the tactical elements used to drive growth,
• etc: name the need. We can very likely help you...

... you should take advantage of our FREE CONSULTATION.

We offer our most experienced, applicable talent to work with you towards creating a plan and related deliverables that intelligently balance profit and growth objectives with the collective capabilities of your team and resources. Our thoroughly-proven model will help you get it right the first time. Your people will love you for finally unchaining their full potential.

The great Yogi Berra said...

If you don't know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.

A PILE OF IMPORTANT IFs

If...

• you are running a business without a plan, you are flying by the seat of your pants... in what at least some employees consider a chaos culture.
• the plan is mostly in the leader's head, that's not really a plan... unless you have a staff of genuine mind-readers who can see & use it there.
• your plan is overly-dependent on any ONE person doing one part, you have functional bottlenecks that- with smart delegation- would fuel a more productive operation.

Even if such norms have seemed to work to date, they are tremendously limiting to the ultimate potential of your company, (hard) capped by just how much your central dispatcher(s) can personally manage at any given time.

If...

• you have a written plan but aren't following it, you don't really have a good plan.
• you are wanting to start a business from scratch, nearly every resource that you might consult will soundly advise you to put together an intelligent, WRITTEN business plan right up front.
• you are looking to sell a company in the next few years, a proven planning culture will maximize the selling price.

Whatever your situation, the Big Innovations team would love to help you create a plan that clearly navigates the road to much more lucrative success: FREE CONSULTATION