What do you think of when you hear the words “Business Plan”?

• A dry, weighty document, full of jargon?
• Pages of spreadsheets, showing income and profit projections?
• (Perhaps) a “Mission Statement” on the cover, with (perhaps) a picture of the CEO above it?
• Something for senior management – never to be read or engaged with by the wider Team?

Imagine if your business plan was an inspiring piece of work:

• Easy to read and understand
• Telling a story, involving everyone
• Presenting the key performance drivers in an engaging and challenging way
• Credible, authentic, and implementation-focused?

Now imagine that those key performance drivers weren’t all about costs of acquisition, costs per employee and so on, but instead majored on “Team Satisfaction”, “Collaboration”, “Communication”, “Innovation”, “Implementation”, and “Customer Delight”?

A business plan that sets out a strategy that is coherent, compelling, and congruent with the organisation’s Purpose. A business plan that can be – and is – shared with every Team member, and regularly reviewed with the Team. A business plan that focuses on Implementation. A business plan that has a Plan B (and, if necessary, C, D, etc).

In other words: a business plan that represents the current and immediate future chapters in the story – the story in which everyone in the organisation knows their part, and can’t wait to see what happens next – so they make it happen! In other words: a business plan whose headlines can be repeated by the newest recruit on the front desk, in their first week in the organisation.

If any of this sounds idealistic – it is! If any of this sounds naïve – well, perhaps it’s naïve to assume that a “business plan” is worth more than the paper it’s written on, if it doesn’t mean anything to the people who have to deliver it.

A POSITIVE business plan, then, is based on the POSITIVE principles I’ve described here. It’s a business plan that flows naturally from the organisation’s Purpose, and logically from its Customer Experience Model. A POSITIVE business plan is the metaphorical blue touch paper that starts the fireworks! Once it comes into contact with the Team, the magic starts to happen…

If you’d like your business plan to aspire to more and deliver more, contact me today for an informal discussion.