How to Create and Use a Reality-Based Business Plan To Drive Results

Posted on March 4, 2013

February 8, 2014.   Moraga, CA.   St. Mary’s College.  A one day class for the Professional MBA Students. Your business deserves your best thinking about the challenges and opportunities at hand.  Yet too often, we rush headlong into an opportunity or a new year with a flurry of tweets, texts, e-mails and white-board scrawling—and underachieve or fail.  If you want to build and lead a healthy sustainable business, and if you value your time, energy and your investor’s money, come to this interactive session.

The morning will be about building a business plan—both for a start-up and for an existing business.  The afternoon will focus on staying on plan and driving results.

Your business deserves your best thinking about the challenges and opportunities at hand.  Yet too often, we rush headlong into an opportunity or a new year with a flurry of tweets, texts, e-mails and white-board scrawling—and underachieve or fail.  If you want to build and lead a healthy sustainable business, and if you value your time, energy and your investor’s money, come to this interactive session. The morning will be about building a business plan—both for a start-up and for an existing business.

A business plan isn’t a document—it’s a road map for action.  Some people never take any time to draw a road map at all, and leap into action without focus or forethought.  They go no-where.  Some sketch out a map, but never check it to see if it matches reality.  They quickly get lost.  Others create a perfectly accurate map, but take so long that they starve before they get under way.  This seminar will help you find the right planning balance for your business, so you create a plan that represents your best thinking given the demands of the situation.

Creating the plan is only the half-way mark.  Just as important is how you keep yourself and your team focused on the plan over time.  How you measure behaviors and results against the plan, and what you do to adjust when circumstances dictate.  How you increase pressure for performance on the management team so that it is productive, not destructive.  Read some of Robert’s articles about business planning.

What you will learn:

• Key elements of every business plan.
• Get your arms around the planning process.
• How and when to test key assumptions.
• Build a simple dashboard and key projects list.
• Learn the secret of creating a plan your team will accept.
• Learn how to monitor the plan and keep your team focused on the most important priorities.
• Deploying your plan to the board of directors, partners, employees.