Business Planning

What is Business Plan?

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth.

It mainly addresses 4 verticals,

Sales and Business Development Planning

Which new markets to be addressed? (Expansion over domestics and or international geographies, industry verticals etc)

Which new products or services to be offered to this market? (Product Portfolio Planning)

How the product will reach the customer and who will make it reach? (Distribution and supply chain planning and Sales force planning)

Operations Planning

What kind of manufacturing facility is required to produce these products?

What should be the capacity of this facility? How it could be gradually build-up?

Unfortunately most of the Planning in SME businesses is capacity driven. They build-up capacities on gut feel and then there is pressure to book those capacities with orders.

Financial Planning

How much funds will be required for running the business and for expansion?

From where will the funds come?

Who and why will he give us funds?

Organization Planning

What kind of people we need for the growth of the business?

What is going to be their contribution to the business and what is the compensation we should offer?

How to build a professionally appealing work culture in our organization?

Why is it required?

Business Planning is formally conducted in all Corporate Businesses. The ownership and controlling management is different in these companies. However in Small and Medium Scale family managed companies’ ownership and control lies with same group of people. Hence no formal planning takes place. Most of the decisions are gut feel based because there is no one to question them. This builds internally a week system of planning and execution. This is the key factor for stagnation and decline at most of the Family Managed Businesses

Advantages of Business Plan

Clarity on Direction of Business Growth

Planning and allocation of resources

Role clarity

Focused review

Planned rewards

Reducing the Risk associated with business

Enhanced ability to attract resources

Who will do it? What are the resources required?

This essentially is the role of top management and has to be executed in consultation with each others as a team. However most of family businesses suffer from lack of coherence and cohesiveness in the top management team.  Most of the top management team members are from technical background which also happens to be the core strength of the business. But that is not enough for the growing business.  

Under such situation external help can be sought off. The experts with wide exposure to corporate business planning culture can be definitely adding value to the business.

What is the COST and what is the BENEFIT?

Business Planning as an activity doesn’t have direct cost components (barring few like cost of market study etc). But it is an exercise which demands a lot of TIME from top management. When the company decides to hire or engage an external agency to expatiate and improve this task, there is cost of fees to be paid to these agencies.

There are lot of intangible benefits which finally become tangible as addition to top-line (sales) and bottom- line (Profits)

Where can I get support?

Definitely you can get support from MBMC Consulting Limited in making your company follow the growth trajectory.