These are simple questions, but if you do not have good answers for these questions, you need to change the way you are building your business.
An annual plan sets up where you want to go in each department of your business. Even if you do not have separate departments yet in your business, it is your roadmap to help you get prepared to accomplish your goals. Annual planning is analyzing where you are to build the steps for the next year and beyond.
This encompasses a true look at your SWOT analysis that shows you where your strengths, weakness, opportunity’s, and threats are to your business. With this we will be able to focus on making the changes to make you stronger as a business.
Annual planning will help you set up goals for each area of business and set a plan to reach your goals. Once you know what your goals are, and you have a plan to reach each goal, you must know where you need to advertise in each area and where you need to invest money to accomplish these goals.
Example: I want to grow my service department by 30%. How many more people will I need to do this? Will I need to purchase new tracks and how much will it take to set up these new trucks? How will I train these new technicians? How will I advertise to get the work for these new technician?
Growing cost money and planning growth properly is the key to succeeding. The more you are proactive in these decisions and have a plan, the better your opportunity is to executing your plan. There is nothing worse than talking about what you want to do, and then just hoping it will work. Hoping is a strategy for bankruptcy. I hope you are not just hoping for success, hoping for things to turn around, hoping to be successful someday.
The Annual plan is something you want to build with your leadership team, this is not a plan you put together one night and file away. This is your roadmap for your hole team. The Annual plan should be built with your leadership team. All your key team members should be involved in building the plan. This will get your team to have by in on the plan and know how they will be part of the plan.
Once you have gone thru the Annual Planning process, you need to keep yourself and your team accountable for the plan. Like every plan there will always be adjustments that need to made to along the way. If you have a plan that all key team members understand it is much easier to adjust and adpt the market conditions and external threats.
All the aspects of Goals in Business work together to help you be successful and will show you where you need to focus your time to be more successful.