The Elements That Make Up a Good Business Plan

We will be discussing the elements that make up a good business plan. As well as how you may begin constructing one to ensure that your firm is sustainable and stable.

A business strategy is a plan that lays out how a company intends to achieve its objectives. It outlines the company’s objectives, as well as the procedures and assets it will require to attain objectives.

For a variety of reasons, a good business plan is critical. For starters, it can assist a corporation in focusing its efforts and resources on the most impactful areas. Second, it can assist a company in staying ahead of the competition and responding to market changes. Finally, a well-executed strategy can boost a company’s profits.

Define your goals
Determine your competitive advantage
Develop a plan of action
Mobilise your resources
Track progress

Define your goals: The Elements That Make Up a Good Business Plan

Establishing your objectives will assist you in devising a strategy for achieving them. You must be very clear regarding what you want to accomplish and how you intend to accomplish it. Your objectives must also be quantifiable so that you can track your progress and stick to the plan.

SMART goal setting is a well-known and trusted framework for goal planning. You can learn more about SMART goal setting here. This is a fantastic place to start when it comes to setting goals.

Competitive Advantage

You must ask yourself four questions to determine your competitive advantage:

What do you excel at that no one else does?

Your competitive edge could be that you provide the greatest service quality or have the most affordable prices. Whatever it is, you must ensure that you are the finest in the world at it.

What do you do that makes you and your firm stand out?

It’s also possible that your competitive advantage is something that just you have. Perhaps you have a patented product or a one-of-a-kind selling strategy. Make sure it’s one-of-a-kind to you, whatever it is.

What skills do you have?

Your greatest asset may be your strengths. Maybe you’re a natural marketer or have a fantastic staff. Whatever it is, make certain that you are maximising your abilities.

What are your weaknesses?

Your weaknesses could also be your biggest asset. Maybe you are not great at customer service, but you are great at product development. You need to find a way to turn your weaknesses into strengths.

At this stage you might also want to complete a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for: (1) Strengths, (2) Weaknesses, (3) Opportunities and (4) Threats. To be whole, you must be honest about your weak spots and what you are not excellent at.

Then set specific goals to help you deal with your vulnerabilities and threats, or play on a field where they won’t matter.

Plan of Action: :The Elements That Make Up a Good Business Plan

Any corporate goal-setting process must start with a clear business vision. Your vision should motivate you and your team while also allowing you to stay focused on your objectives. It must also be reasonable in order to avoid setting yourself up for failure.

Define where you want to be as a business, then break that down in to departments such as: (1) Marketing, (2) Management, (3) Product, (4) Sales, (5) Finance, (6) Quality, (7) Production, (8) Human Resources etc.

Track Progress

You can turn your business and departmental visions into actionable, quantifiable targets and important results once you’ve settled on them.

For instance, your company’s vision can state, “Our aim would be to become industry leaders and increase market share by 30%.”

This is an excellent vision and something to encourage your staff as an objective to accomplish. It’s quantifiable; you can see where you are now and where you need to go; it’s objective and reachable; and it complies with the SMART guidelines.

It is not feasible to handle on a regular schedule, and you cannot certainly set this goals and work hard every day to accomplish it; instead, you must break it down even more into bite-sized goals and important achievements that you can monitor on a weekly basis.

Create Objective Key Results OKRs

This is where Objectives Key Results come in, and especially the software for OKRs.

You can re-write this vision as an objective, eg: Increase our weekly sales to $8million, in New York by November 2022. This is assuming, if you can reach that number in weekly sales, you would have 30% increase in market share in this specific region.

We now have a goal to strive for that is both achievable and understandable to all members of the team. You can import this goal into the Skhokho OKR software and begin creating Key Results to aid in its achievement.

The key results are the small milestones along the way to accomplishing the goals. They should be chosen in such a way that accomplishing these Key Results will also result in the achievement of the target.

In this case, you should break the goal even more and ask, “What are the things I need to accomplish in order to raise my weekly sales?” What are the levers that can be used to move that target? Is it by recruiting more salespeople, increasing ad spending, improving designs, and increasing marketing and phone calls?

Determine what that means for your company and set goals for it. If the goal is to make more calls, figure out where you are currently in terms of calls and where you need to be to meet the goal. In most circumstances, you’ll have numerous Key Results, and the Skhokho OKR program lets you add as many as you need to reach your goal.

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Successful Business Strategy Goal Setting with OKRs

Get started with Skhokho Goal Management with OKRs

For more information on OKRs, check out How to use OKRs