Many business owners don’t spend any time working “on” their business, as they are too busy working “in” the business.

Business planning is so crucial to ensure you keep your business moving in the right direction, and going from strength to strength.

It is good to have a five year strategic plan to ensure your day-to-day decisions are all driving towards your five year goal.

Aligning all your efforts so everything is working in tandem makes goals more achievable.

Recently, we engaged in a business planning exercise and goal setting for our business for the next five years to ensure all our combined efforts are being maximised and are all flowing towards one goal.

Some key things we focused on were:

• Ensuring our leadership team all have the same goals so that decision-making becomes easier.
• Hearing out our awesome team and ways we can ensure they are valued to promote retention and attract new talent.
• Discussing the things we don’t like so we can look for smarter solutions.
• Setting some big goals that we can strive for in the current market, keeping and attracting talent is so important, so finding ways to promote retention of team members is a top priority.

Having more efficiency and embracing technology is also crucial to helping manage any staffing gaps within the team. Working smarter, not harder, is also a top priority.

Our business plan also refocused us on what was most important to us, which is our team and our culture. We want our team to want to come to work, to enjoy work, and to be fulfilled at work.

It is certainly worthwhile getting in an independent person to assist in facilitating a planning day.  A good facilitator will help you bring everyone on the journey of creating the vision for the next five years.  This allows fresh ideas to come forward from others, and may highlight areas that might need work that you had not noticed.  Allow your team to be open about things that are not working.  You want your team to buy into, and contribute to, reaching your goals.

It is crucial though that you don’t invest the time and money into having a great plan and then put it in the bottom draw and forget about. You have to actively work on it. Break it down into bite size chunks (easy, medium, hard), and share it around the team. Let’s be honest, we are not all awesome at every aspect of business.  So see who in your team wants to be part of your vision and take responsibility for an aspect of it. Share it around so it is not just you pushing it forward. After all, there is no “I” in team.