Making your business plan a more practical guide

   

     If you've written your business plan for investors, that's pretty serious business and you might not want to monkey with it. But if, as I have suggested elsewhere, you have prepared a business plan for your own use, you very much want to monkey with it, to fine tune it, to keep it current with the realities of how your business is developing.

    And so, for you, I want to make a suggestion, based on personal experience: Don't go nuts over the format.

    What I am suggesting is that you keep your business plan in a format in which it is easy to make notes, corrections, and adjustments. Don't type up your business plan with careful formatting on the computer which will be a pain to edit. A loose leaf notebook works fine. Loose sheets stapled together with a cover work fine.

    Handwritten works fine. I do a lot of typing but very little fancy formatting. When I first wrote up a business plan (for myself) I thought it would be more impressive, more "official," if I typed it nicely with headings and subheadings and check marks for bullets. My word processing program offered all these options.

    Less than three days had gone by before I wanted to make changes. Oh, the time it had taken to do that nice formatting! So I wrote my new material by hand and just stuck it in at the back, telling myself I would type it up late.

    But I never did.

    In fact, more and more I regard this plan as a living document. I refer to it regularly, make additions and corrections regularly, and now keep the stapled together pages in a simple folder.

    A business plan is only useful when it really is a plan and in the real world plans need to be updated regularly, adjusted regularly, and continually refocused on the goal. The goal alone can remain unchanged.