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Most entrepreneurs have much of the information needed to create a rudimentary business plan in their head. If you are like most business owners, you know what is happening in your business and your industry. You probably attend national trade meetings and read trade magazines. The five steps of the Strategic Business Leadership® (SBL) process will help transfer the information kept in your head and the heads of your top management personnel to a written plan.
The strategic business plan that will be developed for your business will not be a thesis. To the contrary, you are going to develop key elements that clearly express what is wanted without using a lot of words. In place of the usual lengthy and sometimes meaningless word documents, you will have concise statements not to exceed 100 words.
This is a different strategic planning process than the processes used for large public companies. There is greater involvement on the part of the Business Owner and a longer time frame is involved to develop the company plan. The Business Owner will complete the exercises for the five steps, which we refer to as the Front Wheel exercises, before the Planning team, if there is one, gets involved. The Planning Team will not be involved until the Business Owner's thoughts are committed to writing.
As the Business Owner, you will be meeting two hours a month with your SBL Coach to help you through these exercises. The Certified SBL Coach will be helping you at every stage of completing the SBL exercises, initially by asking you the questions found in your exercises and helping you make your responses more concise.
Start filling out the exercises with your Coach during your monthly meetings. Complete the exercises on your own without your Coach. Your SBL Coach is involved to keep you focused on the exercises. Your Coach will help you focus - not on the problems facing your company, but the solutions for those problems. Your Coach will not be there to provide insight into your business; rather, he or she is there to help you bring about action.