Small Business Plan Process | John Briggs, Incite Tax

What's a simplified business planning process that I can use to make sure all aspects of my business are ready for the new year? Okay, look, there's a lot of stuff out there. Like, you've heard of business plans, and they can get intense. I had a client one time, had a good product, and he spent 5 Years trying to perfect his business plan so that he could go out and get income or investors to bring in money so that he could grow his business. When if he would've just brought on a client 5 years prior and used the revenue from that, the business would've had history and that would've been enough to bring on investors. So I say that as a cautionary tale. Don't overthink your business plans. They should not take 5 years to create. They should not take very long to create. I also find business plans in general, once they're created, are never looked at again. I did go through a course with Goldman Sachs called 10,000 Small Business, and they teach you how to create a growth plan. In fact, the entire structure of this 10,000 Small Business course, kind of like a mini MBA, is focused on creating this growth plan for your business. I did a presentation many years ago on the growth plan. I'm gonna really, really quickly click through all the slides on here so that they have— you have it on video, you can pause them. But if you really want access to these, we're happy to make them available to you. I'm gonna first go over the growth plan 'cause the question is related to all aspects of your business, but then I'm gonna show you a simpler method that I use nowadays. So growth plan, make your business work for you. A growth plan is not a business plan, it's not a budget. These are the things that it's gonna include. Like I said, I'm just going through these real quickly so you kind of have them. We, after learning the growth plan, I like the growth plan more than I like the business plan. There's a lot of similarities, but the focus of the plan, the growth plan is like, how are you gonna grow? Not just how are you gonna be in business? Vivid Vision is a concept created by Cameron Herold. We use this In our company for 9 years, and it worked pretty well. However, some things don't work for everybody, and that's okay. But if you want to get more information, Cameron has a bunch of stuff out on the web about Vivid Vision. My— our Vivid Vision was like 5 pages. You set goals in your plan. You want to define who you are as a leader. Very important aspect of your growth plan, especially when you can design your business. You wanna make sure you're designing it to work the way you wanna work. You don't wanna create a plan that's gonna put you in scenarios that you don't enjoy. And yes, sometimes we have to take on tasks we don't enjoy for a short period of time, but the plan would be to get us out of those as quickly as possible. Business owners don't take enough time usually to identify what that looks like. So what's your style as a leader? How are you planning on growing? Who you're leading your team? Go back to that one, pause longer on it. Okay. Are there external advisors that you need to bring in, coaches? Are there areas of your business you're uncomfortable with? That's where a coach really can come into play 'cause they can either help you level up or they can take the knowledge that you don't have and apply their knowledge into that area of your business. Yeah, create a vivid vision, do the goals, determine what type of leader you are, what are your growth aspirations, what are your 5-year business goals, learn how to grow your business, evaluate opportunities for growth, understanding your value. So these are all things that end up in your growth plan. And then these are the final parts, people culture, People, culture, core operations, financials and ratios. Again, if you want these slides, we can make them. We might even update them for you because these are a little bit outdated, but happy to share these with you if you're interested in creating a growth plan. At least you have an outline of what it could look like. But ultimately that's a growth plan. I don't really use a growth plan that often anymore. And the reason is, is one, you actually just, you create the growth plan and it typically lasts for, it's a 5-year plan. Now, from the day I'm recording this, if I thought back 5 years ago, would our business be where it is now? Honestly, I couldn't have even envisioned it. And that's one of the dangers of taking time to try to perfect something that's so far out. Things change, work environments change, which means maybe the approach we take to growing the business changes. You might have a black swan event like COVID that comes into play, which obviously kind of put some people's plans On a different tra— tra— tra— tra— tra— that's a hard word to say— on a different path. Um, so that's kind of the danger with these plans is they focus a little bit too far out. That's why I like looking at in a lot more detail what does a year out look like. And so with that being said, um, we— I did a 4-part series on something we call the Wealth Building Framework. And as part of that, we have the Wealth Building Framework tool, which is what you're looking at here. This is a forecast template. This would go over the next year. And looking at the upcoming year close to the end of the current year is a great time to do that. So like in November or December. you want to look at the next year. And what are your plans? Well, this tool just kind of walks you through that. Again, we did a 4-part training on this, so there's no way I can cover everything here. I just want to show you the tool. You input what your revenue— what you're hoping to do revenue-wise. What are your goals? Are you adding any new service items? Are there items you're taking away? What are those— what's the cost of goods sold going to be on those income items? What expenses are you going to have? Are there going to be any new expenses? Are there expenses you should look at that you've had in the past that you don't need anymore because they're not productive? I learned this from Keith Cunningham. The best way to filter your expenses is to determine, does the expense help me keep a customer, or does it help me get a customer? Great lens to look through. Do you have loan payments? Are you buying any assets? And then this tracks your bank balance. I have an example here of one filled out. This particular example, they had consistent service revenue, and then they wanted to add a self-directed course later on in the year. We expense out some things. Again, I can't go into all detail. It's just, it's way too much to cover in a quick video like this. But the question is, what's a simplified business planning process tool? Look, having an idea of where you want to go in 5 years, not an issue. It's fine. I just wouldn't spend a crazy amount of time creating a perfect document because ultimately 5 years out is a lot less likely to happen the way you currently envision it. But a year out, you can wrap your mind around pretty concretely what next year is going to look like. And so starting with the numbers, I can then ask myself based on the numbers that I'm thinking about, oh, I, I want to add a new service or I want to increase a current income stream. What do I need to do? What do I need to bring into my company in order to make that happen? Is it training team members more efficiently? Is it adding more team members? Is it getting rid of team members? So like looking at how I want my financial statements to look like in the upcoming year allows me to ask the questions of every aspect of my business that's going to help me accomplish that goal that I can pretty well see 12 months out. So that's the recommendation I would give. Uh, remember, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.