It’s nearing the end of 2022. Whether you have met your 2022 business goals or not, it’s time to start thinking about beginning 2023 strong!
Here’s the format to always follow when putting together a business plan:
1. Pick a time-frame. (The constraint helps you prioritize, but also makes things easier to digest and diarize in the next steps.) We like 90 days.
2. Identify (or guess!) your business goals. We like to measure top-line revenue, and we base our projections on previous performance and aspiration, grounded in reality. Although we believe that testing hypotheses is critical in all aspects of business – especially marketing – Big Hairy Audacious Goals don’t often serve the majority of our customers. We prefer to shoot for the mountain-top, not the moon.
3. Reverse-engineer the number of products or services you need to sell to hit your goals. For example, $90k in top-line revenue requires 9 sales of your $10k service. Or 90 sales of your $1k service. Come up with a check-list of inventory to shift in the next quarter.
4. Do you need any new leads to sell that number of units? If yes, add marketing goals. If no, how are you tickling your current prospects to lead them to the purchase?
5. What holes need to be filled from a “making things” perspective? Product development? Internal systems optimization? Software implementation? SOP creation? In this part come up with a prioritized shopping list of system or administrative or product improvements to roll out in 90 days.
6. Now you’ve got your list, add the tasks and milestones to your calendar. Voilà! You’ve now got your project plan.
And when you’ve got your project plan, you’ll ALWAYS know “what to do next” and be confident in the knowledge that what you’re doing next is in service to your business.
Of course, this is a very high-level overview of the decision-making process that goes into what to include and – more critically – what to exclude from your project plan.
It’s useless if it’s over-ambitious. It doesn’t serve you or your business if it’s under-ambitious.
That’s why you should set aside a few hours to go through your project plans BEFORE the year is over. Download our handy, dandy 90-Day Planning Guide here. And if you’d like some additional help, schedule a complimentary Marketing Roadmap call here.