Think you have a business plan that can help your business to become a dominant player in the market and sustain for a long time? It wouldn’t hurt to conduct a double check on everything to make sure that what you got is the best for your business.
While it might take a while for you to fully develop a proper, good business plan, don’t give up or push this task back to another day.
A good business plan can provide your business with many benefits, including:
- Giving the business more opportunities to obtain financing
- Providing a calendar to figure out and prioritize doing what is more important
- Offering various contingency plans
- Etc.
So what constitutes a bad business plan? A business plan is labelled “bad” when it overpromised things to the team, the shareholders, and anyone who involved in the operation of the business. Here are some examples of what your business plan should not do if what you want is business success.
Mistaking Tactics for Strategy
People often confuse between these two terms and think these two can be interchangeable in strategic planning. Well, they are not.
To put it in terms that are easy to understand, strategy points out the direction and the goals for the whole organisation, while tactics refer to how the organisation is going to achieve the goals that the strategy pointed out. So, plans and goals belong to the ‘strategy’ part, while tasks & methods fall into the ‘tactics’ category.
For example: when you are going against a dragon in a video game, your strategy is a surprise attack, and your tactics are to keep jumping up like crazy and throw all the bombs and spears your character has at the dragon.
One more thing, strategies are usually timeless, whilst tactics are tech and time sensitive. Let’s say your strategy is to engage more customers to boost sales – that can stay for as long as you want. However, the way you can achieve that goal needs to be changed over time, for example, putting up posters in-store to promote deals in the old days, and using a variety of online social sites to promote deals in the modern tech world.
Report Performance that Exceeds Industry Averages
Those numbers might look good on the papers, but reality is what matters most. Your investors won’t appreciate the lies when it comes to performance review, so continue to win their trust by keeping it real and find ways to improve your business instead.
Underestimate the Business’s Need for Capital
Adequate capital is needed to start up the business, maintain its operation through hard times, and gives it a good chance to become a profitable enterprise. The costs will build up over time and might get out of hand all of a sudden due to unforeseeable circumstances. Thus, it’s essential that the business owner or the entrepreneur must know how to do their financial projections right and secure a solid capital source for their business in the long run.
Want to know more on business planning or need help planning a strategic one for your business? Contact Maverick for a FREE one-on-one consultation. It will be our pleasure to help you build success with your business.
