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The plan that you use must be:

• clear and specific in its content
• easily understood by all who use or see it
• capable of accepting changes at both a detailed and broad level, and
• capable of being used to monitor what’s actually happening.

The simplest forms of the project plan that will do this for you are:

The Gantt chart, and The Critical Path network. ..more

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These levels of achievement will certainly help redirect an employee’s focus toward becoming world class. However, the manager’s efforts at career redirection will be forever hindered if all of the pay signals are telling the employee to look upward.

Although each of us is motivated by money in different ways, the fact of the matter is that few of us are repelled by money. All of us may not hunger for it, but only a tiny minority of us find money positively distasteful. Therefore the simple truth is that it will be much easier for managers to redirect employees toward alternative career paths if some of those paths involve a raise in pay. ..more

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Licensing, registration and inspection

It is amazing how many businesses require some form of licensing, registration or inspection. Bed and breakfast establishments, for instance, may need to be inspected by fire officers, to be registered with the local authority, and may even need planning permission and official approval of their signs from local planning officers. That’s before they start taking on catering, in which case there is another host of rules to contend with. These rules have been set up for the public good, wisely or otherwise. But many people do not know about them. Unfortunately, ignorance is no defence and you could end up being fined heavily if, for instance, your kitchen is not up to environmental health standards for a catering business, or if you are an unregistered childminder. If you make toys which do not comply with safety standards or sell clothes without the correct labelling, you could also end up in hot water. ..more

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Once you’ve done your market research and worked out if you can make a profit from the business, the next step is to take advice. This will not only confirm whether your calculations are realistic, but can take a lot of the pain out of setting up. The good news is that there’s lots of advice available - and much of it is free. What’s more, experts on small businesses reckon that over 60 per cent of small business failures could be avoided if only people took advice in three areas - money, management and marketing.

1 TECs/LECs A good place to start is your local Training and Enterprise Council (TEC), or Local Enterprise Council (LEC) . These can also put you in touch with other helpful agencies; such as your local Enterprise Agency and Business Link. You can find them through your telephone book, Yellow Pages or local library. The Department of Trade and Industry also has a hotline. ..more

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Even in an era where mandatory retirement ages are .creeping higher and higher, corporate managers need to plan for their own transitions from the seat of power to new roles and other activities.

For some, a top consideration is perpetuating a philosophy of business that they feel they have helped their companies develop. They want to know that what they have contributed to the corporate culture and success will not be lost.

Others are more pragmatic. They accept that new management must set its own standards and tone. They put their energies into planning for their own futures elsewhere.

There are many managers who don’t care too deeply about what happens to their organizations after they leave. Such managers recognize that corporations are, by their nature, designed to survive the individual employee, and they, therefore, see little value in staying too emotionally involved. ..more

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Most business owners write business plans because theyhave a specific need that can be met by a particular audience.

The owners may need a bank loan. In that case, the business plan will be addressed to bankers. The owners may have decided they need to formalize their company’s planning process and require a business plan that all managers can understand. ..more

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It might seem as if I’m complicating matters by suddenly suggesting the possibility of writing several business plans. After all, you might ask, if I’m having difficulty writing one business plan, won’t I simply compound my problems by trying to write two or more plans?

My experience is that you will actually find it easier to address the plan to specific audiences rather than to an abstract, all-inclusive, single audience. When you know your audience, you can “speak” to those readers in terms you know they want to hear or do not want to hear. ..more

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The key concern in preparing multiple business plans ismaking sure that each is tailored to the interests, needs, and fears of its readers. A business plan that is exciting to one group of readers may be terrifying or simply irrelevant to another group.

Consider a business plan for financing. A company wants toraise $3 million and isn’t fussy about whether the money comes from a banker or a venture capitalist. Chances are strong, though, that the business plan that appeals to the venture capitalist won’t appeal to the banker, and vice versa. ..more

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As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, most entrepreneurs have a very specific purpose for their business plan and, once that purpose has been accomplished, the formal planning process is over. The People Express business plan is theonly written plan the company ever put together. The question of why the company never assembled another plan to guide its astonishing growth is one that prompts extensive explanation from founder Donald Burr.

Quite simply, he begins, the company didn’t really need an operating plan once it had financial backing. Not even for budgeting purposes?

“We felt budgeting was one of the things that stand in the way of customer service,” he explains. “The mind-set of budgeting is that it’s finance driven instead of customer driven.”

Burr points to Continental Airlines, which acquired People Express, to illustrate his point. “Continental Airlines lives by budgeting,” he says. “From the food to the uniforms to the people, it’s budget driven. You end up with a seriously flawed product as a result of such a process.” ..more

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If your plan is intended to help your company raise money, you will almost certainly come under questioning and scrutiny from the financiers. How can you be so sure that you will achieve the market penetration you project? Have you given enough credence to the competitive pressures you’ll encounter? Aren’t you perhaps underestimating your sales and administrative expenses? How certain are you that you’ll collect 60% of your receivables in 30 days? And on and on.

Some of the questions and criticisms you encounter will be sincere concerns based on the battle-hardened inquirers’ previous experiences with smaller growing companies. Some, though, will be negotiating ploys. The amount of financing abanker or investor is willing to commit is linked to his or her assessment of the plan’s overall credibility. ..more

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When you think about it, the proof of the pudding as far as any business plan is concerned is how it compares with reality. Investors and bankers will tell you that in their experience, entrepreneurs are lucky to achieve half the sales and profits their plans project.

Indeed, financiers customarily “discount” the plan’s projections to a certain level in determining the amount of financing to make available. That is, bankers may discount the value of assets or receivables intended as collateral. Venture capitalists may discount the expected sales and profits, which are used to help determine the company’s future value, as a way to gauge how much of the company they get for how much investment. ..more

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