This is perhaps the most crucial step, according to Valentine.
“It is one thing to invest the time in working out what the strategy of your business is – which is very important – but it’s then about how you’re going to do it,” she says. “Business plans can be fantastic documents but if they’re put in the top drawer out of sight that’s not going to assist the business owner to achieve the goals they want to achieve.”
A really important step is understanding when it’s time to stop planning and start getting down to work. It’s all about making the business plan a “living, breathing document”.
“Often in business you know what you want to achieve and it will take a few different attempts to get you to that goal,” says Valentine. “So you have to be able to move with that and try different things until you find the things that are going to be most successful.”
Valentine says there’s little point in having a business plan unless you as the business owner remain accountable to it.
“Small business owners work for themselves and often they’re not able to access that layer of accountability back to their own plan,” she says. “Surrounding yourself with a great team and great advisers helps you hold yourself accountable back to your plan.”
Valentine says a really good way of making sure you implement your business plan is to get other people to be aware of it. This could be as simple as providing a copy to employees for them to read, or even holding regular meetings where they can provide feedback on how the plan is progressing.
“I think in a lot of business people want to be part of that success so you really can bring the team along for the ride,” Valentine says. “What I do with a lot of my clients is we will help them hold regular board meetings except in that small business sense. So that allows them to bounce ideas off and also have that accountability back to their plan.”
Broede Carmody is a former senior SmartCompany reporter. Before this, he was a co-editor of RMIT University’s student magazine Catalyst.
