TLDR; Creating a Business Plan
The TLDR Series aims to distill complex information and processes into a very concise, easy to implement sets of steps. The Series will tackle a range of seemingly intimidating topics in Business, Starting Up, Leadership, Technology and other similar fields. These articles of course, in no way will give you enough detail to achieve everything you are setting out to do. However it will demystify a lot of jargon and complicated-sounding things into simple actionable tasks that will get you started in the right direction.The arduous and sometimes feared task of creating a business plan has always seemed inaccessible to most folks in the early stage of their ventures. I mean, "I just want to execute, why are you making me do all this?", "This is not one of my strengths, I know my business so let me just do that". Creating a B-Plan seems so scary that most of us don't bother creating one until some VCs ask for it, and therefore end up failing to utilize it's obvious value in the journey of any venture. Let's try and change this perspective. A B-Plan is a friend.
A business plan is just a way of putting down the Why, What and How of a business so everyone including you has something to use as a guiding document at any point over the course of your executing your idea.
Follow this simple 3 step process to create your own basic version of a Business Plan:
1. Clarifying Your Why, and your Goals
Before anything, you need to make sure your reason for starting out is crystal clear, to you, your team and in time, your customers/stakeholders.
There are two things you must do here.
Define your Vision: This is a statement of what you visualize your venture to be in this world - what everyone will know it by. Google's Vision is "to provide access to the world's information in one click." See how it clarifies absolutely everything they do? Here's a neat article on how to do it - Link
Define your Mission: A mission is a slightly more tangible, short term definition of what your company wants to do. It should involve 3 things - Who your target market is, how your product/service adds value to them, and what your USP is, that differentiates you from everyone else doing the same thing. You could also add tangible goals here - How much of your target market? How much value are you adding to them? In what time frame? Here's how you can do it - Link
2. Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas is a great way to start off making sense of, and formalizing how your business needs to work. There is a great series on Youtube by Strategyser that explains very neatly how to do this. Just head on to those videos here and map your business out as described in the 6 video playlist.
Completing this exercise should give you a super clear understanding of the following (amongst the 9 elements on the Canvas), that you can carry forward into the next step:
What you need to be doing on a daily/weekly/monthly basis
How you're making money (capitalism aside, this is the only real indicator of how much value you are creating)
How you're going to engage you customers
Where your costs will be
3. Creating a Time-bound plan to achieve your goals
This is what it all boils down to - what are the things you are betting that you need to do by when, in order to realize the Vision that you put down in Step 1?
The most widely used framework to do this is called the OKR framework. This will help you clearly define who (you/your team) will do what, how much, by when. The goals on the OKRs must lead you onto hitting the tangible numbers you defined in your Mission Statement.
Read how to put down your OKRs here - LINK
If you'd rather just have the template and get to putting yours down, here it is: LINK
That's it!
Your OKRs, with your clearly defined Vision and Mission and a budget (this is another proccess, coming soon so stay tuned to this space!), will give you, or anyone for that matter a crystal clear snapshot of Why, How and What value you intend to create in this world.
This is obviously a very simplified version of the ideal process. MotivOcean offers a 3 month program to not only support you with defining your Business Plan, but also taking it from there onto seeing your first results!
Have questions or feedback? Want to discuss anything in particular? Reach out to me any time!
I head MotivOcean Consulting, and am helping startups and SMEs solve technology and business challenges with a combination of design thinking, and common sense.
