Business Plan Burnout

Avoid business plan burnout.

It is easy, especially in a small or younger organization to invest too much time in business planning. A larger organization may have more resources and people that can devote greater amounts of time to business planning. Figure out the right balance of time and resources that works for your organization between planning and implementation.

The right fit

Ideally business planning becomes a regular business practice that the company begins to become efficient with. Business planning should be done with an eye on repeatability of the things that work best for the organization. Avoid the appearance of “brand new” business plans each year and rather focus on fixing and optimizing through practices that the organization is familiar with. In this way the “planning” part of business planning becomes more efficient (the numbers being analyzed and the forecasts being made) and the process become less onerous if the format is consistent.

One indication of business plan burnout is the attitude of your managers and employees. If people start rolling their eyes you know there is a problem. Employees look forward to going through a business planning process that is efficient, familiar and revealing. Thinking about business planning in this way begins to take much of the burden out of the process and allows more energy to be focused on key themes, useful exercises and areas of optimization.

Avoid these

• Avoid too much planning and not enough actions to implement
• A complex business planning process that doesn't match the organization and the participants
• Spending too much time writing the business plan and creating a long complex document.
• Too many strategies for the organization to focus on in the coming year

Related Best Practices

• Building a Business Plan – New SBA Online Tool
• Business Plan for a Startup
• Business Plan for an Ongoing Business

Resources

"How to write a great business plan", by William A. Sahlman, Harvard Business School Press, 2008

Author

The author of this page is Joe Nordlinger

Joe Nordlinger is founder, President and CEO of Ascent a US based professional staffing firm. Ascent places highly skilled professionals in Technology, Business Professional & Pharma (Clinical & Scientific) positions—both contract and direct hire—at Fortune 1000, mid-size, and startup companies in a range of industries. Prior to Ascent, Joe was a business development manager for Cap Gemini-Ernst & Young and holds w Bachelor of Arts in International Political Economics from the University of California at San Diego.