The Planning Assessment Questionnaire can help you decide whether the Small Business Planning Workshop is for you. 

1. Do you have a small business?
2. Have you been working without an annual plan with key improvement strategies?
3. Are you still too small to justify a Planning Department?
4. Would you like to have a set of initiatives with goals and execution plans to improve your business in 2012?
5. Has your annual plan been limited to sales growth?
6. Have you suffered over the complexity of methodologies to structure your annual plan?
7. Are you missing simple tools to define direction in your company?
8. Would you be willing to spend a day to learn simple ways to define your company’s annual improvement plan?
9. Have you forgotten to review the strengths and weaknesses in your business, in detail?
10. Would a key initiatives roadmap with goals and deliverables be useful to improve discipline of results in your company?

If you have answered YES to any of these questions, the 2012 Small Business Planning Workshop is definitely for you.

If you are willing to spend two days learning simple ways to define your company’s annual improvement plan:

The 2012 Small Business Planning Workshop is a two day learning experience simple and easy for small business, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs to:

• Structure an effective planning calendar in your company to develop your annual plan.
• Learn how to involve collaborators to build a good bottom-up annual plan.
• Understand and define the concepts of Mission, Vision and Values as direction and marketing tools.
• Know and define the market opportunity matrix for your business.
• Develop a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) for your company.
• Combine your SWOT Analysis with the key areas of the Balance Scorecard Methodology to generate initiatives.
• Learn a method to generate and evaluate key initiatives.
• Build a good sales plan based on history and ongoing business.
• Learn to write SMART goals and define clear deliverables.
• Develop TIMED plans for discipline and focus in your organization.
• Define metrics for your goals and an “Owner’s Dashboard”
• Communicate the annual plan, in an effective manner, to the organization for improved commitment.

Why do I need an annual plan? I am not a large corporation.

Sometimes small businesses do not plan at all or limit their planning to a percentage increase in their sales plan. This causes all efforts in the company during the year to be focused on more sales without key initiatives to improve other areas of the businessrelated to finances, people, customer service and processes.

In other cases small businesses define goals but fail to accompany them with precise plans including activities, dates, metrics and deliverables. Many times these fail at executing and the planning ends up being “good intentions” with bad execution.

You don’t need a planning department or complex methodologies to think like a corporation and develop an executable annual plan that helps your business to dramatically improve its results and grow better and stronger.

Reduce some common small business planning mistakes like:

• Trying to do the annual planning in a one day offsite meeting.
• Not involving collaborators to build the plan.
• Not reviewing areas of opportunity like new sales to old customers, or new markets.
• Not reviewing where to apply strengths.
• Not planning for weakness corrections.
• Not preventing or diminishing the effect of threats.
• Trying to achieve too much in one year.
• Setting unrealistic goals.
• Broadening the scope of action with diverse goals for collaborators reducing effectiveness.
• Not communicating a summary of the plan and key focus areas when the plan is ready.

IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN, YOU PLAN TO FAIL

If you still have questions maybe our Frequent Q&A can help.