Posts Tagged ‘planning’

Organisational Chart based on current and future requirements

How do you know when it’s time to hire more people or outsource tasks? That’s where your resources plan comes into action.

For most start-ups, when you first begin business you have to wear many different hats. You are the sales person, chief marketer, bookkeeper and even the cleaner!

Of course your hope is not to continue with all of these roles in the future. If you determine your organisational chart, you can in fact see where your “many hats” exist and map them out for your business.

Task Analysis

One of the best things to do is look at the tasks you are handling now or are still on your to-do list. If you refer to your marketing plan and financial plan, what tasks are required to move your business forward, to reach your goals, to implement those plans and achieve your financial objectives?

There are probably tasks that you procrastinate on continually because you hate doing them! If there’s a way to plan for additional resources to complete those tasks, make it happen. You will be a much happier business owner.

Maybe your marketing plan is overly ambitious for your skill set? What skill set do you require to make it happen? Make sure it’s budgeted for in your financial plan and you’re partly on your way to achieving your marketing plan.

Once you’ve collated all necessary tasks, analyse them carefully and see if you can identify a batch of tasks that are similar and thus suited to a particular skill set. From those identified skills, what experience, qualifications, personality and attitude are required to fulfil the roles and responsibilities of that position?

With this information, you have the making of job descriptions and then you can decide on employment type (i.e. subcontractor, full time or casual employee).

Organise departmentally

If you think about large organisations, they consist of many departments, but they all started off small at some stage. It may have been a long time ago, but many roles were conducted by just a few people. Rather than waiting until you are big enough to departmentalise, set the roles and departments in place now to clearly identify what positions you will require in the future.

Depending on the stage of your business there are a few departments you can start planning for:

• Operations
• Sales/marketing
• Finance
• Customer Service
• Product Development

As I mentioned earlier, you’re probably handling the above functions yourself, however sooner or later you’ll need to outsource if you want to achieve your goals and objectives.

Financial, marketing and resources plan intrinsically linked

It’s great to plan but if you don’t have the resources required to execute your plan, there’s not much point. So, based on your marketing plan and your financial objectives, what resources will you actually require to achieve your objectives?

It could be as simple as requiring some admin assistance to allow you to concentrate on money-making tasks.

Perhaps you’ll need some sales staff (or distributors depending on your model) or maybe it’s time to engage the services of a fulfilment house?

The beauty of resource planning is that it literally ties into your financial planning as well. If a new staff member is required, what will their salary be? Remember you need to budget for this. If you need a fulfilment house, what are your options? Even with commission-based sales staff or distributors, what will their rate be and how will that fit into your financial plan?

You can see how your financial plan, marketing plan and resources plan are all interrelated. You need the marketing and resources to achieve the financial plan, and vice versa.

Map your resources based on your marketing calendar

In my article about achieving goals with a marketing plan I showed you how to create a marketing calendar to schedule and keep track of your marketing activities. You can also use your marketing calendar to map out when you’ll require extra resources to achieve the goals set out in your marketing plan. Your marketing calendar will show you when major promotions are being held and what resources you will require to implement these promotions.

There are many things you should plan, but what should you plan for your business? Planning comes in many forms, and combined can provide you with a blueprint to keep your business moving forward.

I consider there to be a few areas within your business that can benefit greatly from planning including a financial plan, marketing plan and a resources plan.

Before you start creating these plans, whether you’re a new business or existing, it pays to revisit your vision, mission and values for your business. These can sometimes be tricky to define. My mentor gave the simplest definition I have ever come across:

• Vision - what are you and what are you becoming?
• Mission – what do you do? What business are you in?
• Values - what words encompass your business values?

If you haven’t worked this out yet, it can take time and a few attempts. Sometimes your business evolves in a different direction and when revisiting these, you find that they are not congruent with where you’re at now.

Therefore it’s a good idea to revisit your vision, mission and values at least once a year.

There are many and varied techniques for goal setting and planning for a new year. Let’s look at a few of my favourites:

The first method (I learnt this from Chris Brogan (http://www NULL.chrisbrogan NULL.com/)) relates to selecting three keywords that encompass what you want to achieve for the year. You then take your three words and map out how they can be achieved including strategies to achieve them, any distractions that may impede you, the projects to achieve the strategies, what the achieved goal (or partially achieved goal) looks like and the next step required to continue on the goals path. You can read more about this here (http://www NULL.chrisbrogan NULL.com/wiring-yourself-for-success).

The second method involves a one page document which includes summaries of your goals. You put this single page somewhere so you can see it every day, to make sure you are working on tasks that relate to achieving your goals. This will ensure you aren’t getting distracted and working on non-goal related items.

New opportunities can arise that perhaps don’t fit within your existing goals (otherwise known as bright shiny objects!) but could be awesome opportunities. So how do you determine whether they should be pursued?

Simply refer back to your mission and vision. Is the opportunity in line with these? Just by looking at this can take the shininess off an opportunity and put it back into perspective.

Once you have determined your three keywords or goals, what else needs to tie in with these?

A financial plan can entail:

• Budgets
• Forecast
• Cashflow forecasts

Depending on your needs (and what you’re actually going to use) will determine which reports you require. All of these reports can assist you in maintaining your goals and keeping yourself on track. You’ll also discover what other requirements you may need to achieve them.

A marketing plan can entail:

• Your target market
• Marketing strategies
• Marketing tools to utilise
• Marketing calendar to map out all promotions etc

A resources plan can entail:

• Business organisational chart (even if it’s just you in most positions)
• Resources required based on marketing plan
• Resources required to achieve your goals
• Resources calendar to map out when resources are required

Once you have these plans in place, you can map out the tasks that would be required on a monthly, weekly and daily basis. Your calendars will help to focus you on deadlines to achieve tasks by. If you start monthly and then break it down to weekly and then daily tasks, not only will your goals feel more achievable but you’ll actually be making daily progress. This will give you a big buzz enabling you to maintain your focus and momentum.

All three of the plans above require greater explanation. I will explain these in greater detail in further newsletters!

So start today, start planning, it can take some time if you really do get into the nitty gritty but if it gives you a year’s worth of focus, wouldn’t it be worth it?

In a separate article on planning, I considered the three areas that benefit greatly from planning and thus review:

• Financial
• Marketing
• Resources

There’s no point spending time creating plans for these areas of your business if you’re not going to review their status. This is your reminder to review, but where to start?

Start with your goals. What were your goals? How are they tracking? Perhaps you wanted to attract four new clients per month, launch a new product line or increase your average daily sale by $X amount. Whatever the goal, it must be tracked so that you can see its impact on the financials. Let’s take each of the theoretical goals just mentioned and discuss them further:

Goal to attract new clients

Goal = 4 new clients per month
Actual = 2 new clients per month

If you have a look at your sales revenue you should probably see an increase. If it is static or has reduced, there may be other contributing factors such as reduced fees, other clients lost or maybe an invoice has yet to be generated. Now if you hadn’t measured your goal and thus looked at the impact on your financials, you may never have realised that you had missed invoicing someone or the huge impact that lost client has had.

Goal to launch new product line

Goal = new product line launched by April 30th
Actual = delayed for 1 month due to supply issues

If you have a look at your profit and loss statement, you’ll obviously see that there is no revenue relating to that product. Your sales by product would indicate this as well. But what probably appears in the profit and loss are expenses associated with the development of this new product line (technically they could be assets but I won’t go there!). Now, as there is no revenue from that product yet, the results (although actual) are distorted due to this fact. Now you can see how analysis of those goals gives you vital information for the story behind your numbers.

Goal to increase average daily sales

Goal = increase average daily sales by $2 per day (large volume of transactions)
Actual = increased average daily sales by $2 for first week, but then dropped back.

Let’s start with the analysis of achieving the goal one week of the month. Perhaps you ran a promotion for one week to promote a particular product line. The effect was great, for a week at least, but then you stopped promoting that product for whatever reason. In other words, you dropped the ball and you undid all your great work!

In the profit and loss reports you may show a slight increase in expenses associated with this promotion. The extra revenue generated for the week will also appear, but it may not cover expenses incurred, which makes the promotion look like it did not work. This may not be a fair assessment. If you do not monitor and perhaps tweak any marketing or promotions for your business you will not see the translation into net profit. Enthusiasm, consistency and effort are major components of effective promotion and marketing.

As you can see, not only is reviewing your goals important from the stance of checking where you are on your journey but it also helps you read and understand the story behind your numbers. Unusual occurrences or nuances will come to light that you may not have discovered if you had not measured your goals and achievements.

You can also see the importance of “reading” your numbers and trying to understand them. Your tax accountant will probably not know about the internal occurrences relating to your goals and thus cannot interpret those results for you in that manner because they base it on the clear hard facts.

They may ask you questions to determine any factors affecting the accounts and this is where your responsibility lies. You need to understand how what you are doing (or achieving) in your business affects your financials. If you are unable to see and learn the connection between your actions and your financials, then ask for help. Speak to a management accountant or business coach. Speak to someone that can assist you to understand the story behind those black and white (and sometimes red!) numbers.