Planning is a key advisory service – Keep it personal!

Summer break is ending, and I can feel it.

With three weeks remaining before the beginning of a new school year, there is a need to get it all in! There were big expectations for our summer plan: night time bike rides and star gazing, s’mores, family reading, and pool time. Maybe a trip to the mountains, and if we are applying stretch goals, the ocean too!

At the same time, our family had some limitations: two full-time working parents, plus the dreaded Commitments (capital for effect). And of course, balancing the child’s wants with the family’s needs is always fun!

Personal planning

With summer slipping away, I’m thinking about those last most important things to do together as a family to take advantage of the precious time remaining, and I’m putting together an adjusted plan.

This type of planning makes perfect sense. We do it all the time in our personal lives for all sorts of goals. Planning a vacation? Planning for retirement? Planning for next month’s grocery bill? We plan, we live the plan a bit, then we adjust based on our progress. We live some more, adjust again, and on and on. It makes sense—we want to be sure to get the most in life, and our plan helps us get there.

Business planning – Small business versus big

Public and mid-size companies do this same type of planning. Each quarter they must report to shareholders and their board. They are continuously in a cycle of planning, measuring, and adjusting.

Why then does this very straightforward idea seem to vex many small and micro-business owners? I can’t provide hard data on it, but having been in this business for 25 years, I believe it’s simply because micro and small business owners are busy! They are usually understaffed, over-tired, and leveraged. The idea of planning, while enticing, seems too far afield. But that’s where you come in. As a trusted advisor, there’s a huge opportunity to help your small business clients build a plan which can be used to manage their business.

To be especially useful, the plan should be living, which means it’s referred to regularly for advice, and it’s updated at regular intervals too.

It should also be lean. Lean means it’s not formal—it’s in bullet points and almost note form, and contains the right information to elicit business decisions. Decisions such as capital purchases, staffing, sales and marketing spend, credit terms, and so on, are examples of business management decisions that are addressed by a living Lean Plan.

Advisors can help businesses create a roadmap

The right components of a Lean Business Plan will feed and inform a financial forecast. A forecast is comprised of educated guesses on sales and expenses, and the timing of cash receipts, as well as other fiscal inputs. A finished forecast should include three primary statements: a profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow.

The forecast becomes the roadmap for running the business. Like a map that shows how to get from point A to B, a financial forecast will reveal which business decisions to make to reach the desired goals. It’s used to manage the business, and is the centerpiece of your advisory relationship. If the roadmap produces less than desired results, it can be adjusted—but only when it’s determined that it’s the roadmap (the forecast), and not the driver (the business operation itself), that’s led you off course.

So how do you get there?

How do you develop this crystal ball of business decisions?! It’s actually rather straightforward. It starts with the Lean Plan—putting together “just enough” business information so that it’s useful for your small business client. Let’s look at each section of the Lean Business Plan and how it ties to, and affects, the forecast.

As you read these, remember, it’s not up to you to come up with all the answers. Your job as an advisor is simply to direct the conversation and ask the right questions. Having a clear agenda and talking points helps a lot. We’ve developed a resource guide for a planning meeting. There’s a link to download it at the end of this list.

Problem worth solving and business solution

The problem. This first part about the market problem is crucial. For a business to stay relevant, which means truly servicing its customers, it must solve for an actual market problem.

The solution. The business solution your client defines from the market problem will eventually translate to what the business will sell, which will feed the sales, or revenue forecast.

It adds up to motivation. In addition to being foundational, these items are your own window into what truly motivates the business owner. How they talk about the market problem and their solution will reveal to you their passion and their goals—crucial for helping them succeed.

Target market

Simply put, who will the business sell to? This information will inform the sales growth plan, and revenue forecast. Understanding the business’s target market in their servable area will expose the business’s potential, as well as its limits.

Sales and marketing

What will it sell, and how will it sell it? This is where you really begin to understand the economics of the business’s sales model. New resources and partners are discovered here as well, which become a key part of the overall plan.

Understanding sales and marketing needs will also inform the expense side of the forecast. Sales and marketing expenses are typically one of the most underestimated pieces of the forecast.

Partners and resources

Who and what does the business rely on? Simply put, this section equals untapped potential. All resources should be considered assets. Maybe not in the accounting style of thinking about booked value and depreciation, but certainly items that could generate new revenue, expense savings, or general leverage. For instance, key team members and strategic partners can elicit new sales potential, help a business cut expenses, or possibly leverage an untapped market.

In addition to people, many businesses are sitting on intellectual property they don’t even realize they have, and some of these should be treated as proper assets. A healthy conversation about resources and partners should cover all of these subjects.

Milestones

Never forget milestones! They may seem mundane, but they are key to successful execution of the plan. Milestones come in all forms: contractual obligations, long-term strategic goals, and (most important, really) the tedious ones that help a business reach their next small goal. Meetings with key partners, research on competition, collecting on a large payment from a client, anything that affects the business plan can be given a due-date and treated as a milestone. And as your relationship grows, the milestones will take over as key agenda items at each advisory meeting.

These business plan components form the bedrock of the business. They are comprehensive and broad. The information they generate will inform the financial forecast in a way that is both personal for this business, as well as strategic. You can cover these items in a meeting with your clients that lasts about one hour.

Having a structure for this meeting, with an agenda and some talking points is helpful. We’ve developed a resource guide for a structured planning meeting – you can download it here.

Personal motivations

Like any type of plan, a business plan has nuances. It isn’t all black and white. For the micro and small business owner, these nuances are the expectations, needs, wants, and limitations of the business owner him or herself. As an advisor, it’s impossible to keep the business roadmap on track without understanding these four critical items living inside the business owner’s head.

The smaller the business, the more these four items impact the plan. Once a business reaches a larger size it is managed by a team of individuals, usually a CEO, CFO, COO, and other C level executives. These executives make group decisions during meetings over periods of time with individuals weighing in, and all manner of goals being considered.

The micro business owner, however, is another story. Small and micro businesses are typically managed by the owner themselves. And, because they are outsourcing their accounting and business planning, they do not have a staff of individuals to make group decisions. The owner is making independent, personal decisions.

And all personal decisions are motivated by expectations, needs, wants, and limitations. These decisions, once made, will directly affect the day to day management of the organization, so it’s important for you, their advisor, to understand them. For each section of the Lean Planning meeting, be sure to consider expectations, needs, wants, and limitations.

Putting it all together

Here are some examples of how personal motivations can affect a business:

• Expectations: Does the business have a growth trajectory based on the unique interests of the owner, or the owner’s market space?
• Needs: Does the business owner have certain personal financial goals that affect budgeting decisions? Or certain other fixed expenses based on perceived need?
• Wants: Has the owner established certain personal goals or interests that affect business decisions and impact net profit?
• Limitations: Does this business have unique seasonality based on the type of business or the location? Is there unique competition because of it? Certain contractual requirements from investors or partners?

Industry standards and benchmarking data are helpful resources but they cannot be used solely to determine growth potential for (especially) a small business. It is the individual business owner running their individual business. You must have your radar set on them and ask the right questions to understand what drives them, what makes them unique, and what their individual expectations and needs may be.

Coming back to my opening example for my own family, I could take my daughter to the local minor league baseball game as part of my adjusted summer plan, because most of the people in our area love to do that (it’s benchmarked!), but she would be bored out of her mind! That’s not part of her expectation.

And the perfect Saturday morning for my husband and myself? Going to high intensity interval training together, and then to brunch. My guess is that this wouldn’t show up on the industry standard benchmarking for most middle-aged married couples. But it’s part of our needs, wants, requirements, and even expectations, so it’s on our roadmap.

If you want to help your clients grow, get to know them. Understand their unique business goals and personal motivations. Translate those into a living business plan, using a structured method, and use that plan to model a roadmap for their perfect business.

You cannot get anywhere effectively without a plan. Help your clients put together their plan and be a part of their growth. It will be an exciting ride!

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on the LivePlan Strategic Advisor blog.