Small Business Planning

Small Business Planning

The top 5 steps to business continuity planning

Small business owners tend to be great planners - they’ve developed detailed business, financial and five-year plans, and spend a lot of time on organization and goal evaluation. Once you’ve gotten through the hectic initial start-up phase, you have to keep those planning skills working hard to develop a business continuity plan.

You need to ask yourself: how am I going to keep my business operating lucratively for a long period of time?

Tips for Successful Business Continuity Planning

Here are some of the most important steps to successfully planning for business continuity:

  • Identify your strengths and weaknesses. What is your biggest advantage over the competition? What do they have over you? How much risk will you have to take to perfect your strengths and address your weaknesses? Should you focus on one or the other or should you develop a plan that addresses both? You need to establish your best plan of attack, considering both potential and risk.
  • Analyze your current situation. Ask yourself if there are better ways to be doing things. The important thing is to streamline and maximize your efforts so that you are spending less time, effort and money than you’re getting a return on. Are there processes you can make more efficient? Establish your priorities based on how you can improve on what you’ve already put in place.
  • Develop a plan. At this point, you actually need to sit down and physically write out your plan. You didn’t go into your business startup with just a bunch of ideas floating around in your head, and you can’t survive that way either. Establish goals, a timeline, a budget and a plan of attack.
  • Get going. Once you’ve developed a plan that you feel will work for your business, put it in action! The best laid plans mean nothing if you don’t take the time to schedule your efforts and follow the guide you made out for yourself. Of course, you’ll find times when you have to be flexible and things don’t always work out the way you planned, but you have an overall goal in mind that you’ve designed a process for, and you should do your best to stick to it.
  • Maintain. Don’t let the wind go out of your sails, regardless of how successful you’ve been with your plan. Just because you’ve exceeded expectations doesn’t mean you should abandon your plan - if it works, keep at it! On the other hand, if you’re meeting with obstacles or failures, don’t give up all hope. The plan may need a little reworking once the realities of business have worked their way through your estimated results, but even a plan that needs review is better than no plan at all. Periodically evaluate how things are going and adjust the plan accordingly.