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SME owners: accelerate business growth.

A business plan – is it worth the effort? One of the first questions anyone who starts a new business will hear is “Do you have a business plan?” If you ask business owners a couple of years after they started the business, when did they last look at the business plan, and if they did how close was the reality to the plan the answers you will most probably hear are “never” and “net very”, respectively. Having written and read dozens of business plans over the years I have found 3 reasons for this: 1. Business plans are usually written when there are big dreams but no business yet, and therefore there is very little information about the business and the market so they can’t be accurate. 2. They include 3–5-year forecasts. Even a business that is running for a long time cannot really forecast for such a long time, let alone a business that doesn’t even exist yet. 3. There is no execution element whatsoever. The plan says what the founders hope will happen, but it doesn’t say how to achieve it. So, a lot of time and effort (and sometimes money) is spent in writing plans that provide very little. The question is WHY? The main reason is that people don’t know any better. Business plans have been established as a must, and few people stop and ask if this is the right solution. Funnily enough, when I talk to experienced entrepreneurs, executives and business mentors, they all agree with me about their irrelevance, but this still goes on. I don’t claim that business plans have no merit. Writing them requires whoever wants to start a business to sit down and go through a thorough thought process so they can establish a proper case for setting it up. The main difficulty is to maintain objectivity. Unfortunately, I am yet to see anyone starting to write a business plan and saying after a while “Nah, this is never going to work”. Entrepreneurs are optimists by nature and will just write a plan that justifies whatever they set out to do… But even those that do a proper job and start a business may find that after a while it doesn’t work or stuck in a rut. And for lack of a better idea, they go back to writing a new business plan only to find that the new plan doesn’t work any better than the old one. There is an alternative, but this post is about highlighting the fallibility of business plans. Interested in learning more about how to get it right? DM me. #businessplans #entrepreneurs #sme #growth #strategy

Ziv Geva

Co-CEO of BDR Group and Director at Synoia Technologies | Technical Specialist | Supply Chain Expert

5mo

Start with an idea, don't get overwhelmed by a business plan

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