Running a small business can be time consuming. You’ve got enough to do to fill orders, buy stock, invoice customers and so on without all those other jobs like management, planning, marketing and finance.
Most small business owners just want to get on with the job!
But wait. This is why you are in business – to run a business. This, in fact, must be your first priority if you want your business to survive and move forward. Neglecting these important activities can do more to erode the business’ base than anything else.
You need to find the time to devote to planning and steering the business rather than being the all-rounder who does everything.
- Planning where the business is going
- Developing customer relations
- Team training and development
- Reviewing actual results
- Planning effective delegation.
Research in Australia found that more than 50% of new businesses fail within the first year and after three years over 80% had failed. The results – which would be similar for new business start-ups in New Zealand – found that 80% of these failures were the result of managerial incompetence and inexperience.
If you made a business plan before you started your business – congratulations! But that is not the end of it. Planning does not stop once the business is up and running. You need to keep at it. You need to look ahead one year, maybe three. You need to constantly know where you are heading and where your goals are.
Think of it as a step-by-step process in which you need to focus on the actual steps. The critical part of any planning is in the planning, not the finished plan.
The step-by-step process also makes the business planning exercise much less daunting. People get put off the idea of business planning because it sounds difficult. Don’t think the task is insurmountable. It is simply a method of analysing your business using simple concepts that you may already be using without realising.
www.astillhawke.co.nz
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