The Importance of a business plan
When you own a small trade business your time is mostly spent managing a bunch of tradies while also trying to put out fires and deal with the chaos that is owning your own business, for these reasons you can often put your business goals and plans on the back burner or feel like there is never enough hours in the day to focus on those goals.
What many business owners fail to realise is that creating a strong, achievable business plan and goals is one of the best and fastest ways to increase your overall earnings and productivity.
You may be asking yourself, what exactly does a business plan entail? Simply, It is a detailed document that addresses how a company will achieve its goals.
In your plan, you should focus on 3 different areas, creating an effective strategy for growth, determining your future financial needs, and lastly, attracting potential investors, lenders, or funding.
Now you may be thinking, where do I start? How do I create a strong business plan and goals? Well, this is where a Chief Financial Officer or a CFO comes in.
A CFO’s job is to help you run your business efficiently and effectively by helping you with the planning, implementation, running, and managing of all the financial activities within your business. This includes planning, forecasting, budgeting, and negotiating.
A CFO is able to analyse and assess your internal operations and help you devise a business plan that will work best for your specific needs, leading to greater financial growth.
CFO’s will typically adopt the role of integrating business planning or IBP. IBP addresses every stage of the planning process from commercial planning and demand to portfolio strategies.
When a CFO is helping you create a business plan, they typically focus on these aspects
What a CFO can do for you
- Providing objective analysis and insight
- Challenging assumptions, implications, and priorities
- Allocating capital to the right investments and initiatives
- Leading or guiding the decision-making process
- Ensuring risks are identified and addressed to prevent future risk
- Get the right people involved in important decision making
- Identifying and improving constraints (financial, capability, productivity etc)
- Providing an outside perspective from the inside.
- Identifying blind spots and unknowns
Creating an effective and detailed business plan doesn’t have to be hard and you definitely do not need to do this by yourself.
Getting help and assistance from a CFO will ensure you have an accurate and achievable plan so you are able to see positive change and results.
Check out some of our other posts to learn more about how a CFO can help your business thrive and grow your business profit long-term.
