Many people are racing towards a business planning deadline, either to meet a funder’s requirements or because we will shortly be moving into a new financial year. Here’s a very quick checklist to help fine tune the final elements:
- The Executive Summary: does it genuinely give a good overview of your strategy and approach? If this was the only thing somebody read would it make sense as a standalone summary?
- Aims and objectives: have you been realistic about what you can achieve? Have you been clear about the targets you are committing to and that there aren’t too many?
- Values: are they reflected throughout the document? Hve you outlined the expected behaviours or principles that show your values in action??
- The Offer (programme, events, screenings, workshops etc.): have you been really clear about the connection between what you are offering and what people are prepared to pay for? What assumptions are you making about behaviours in the coming months?
- Finances: have you modelled possible scenarios? Are your assumptions explicit? Do the numbers tie into the narrative consistently and coherently?
- People (your people): have you allowed for your team to readjust as the situation changes? Do you have support packages in place to help people cope with what they have been through in the last twelve months?
- Experiments and tests: have you been overt in the plan that some things need an experimental approach, and should be treated as work in progress? If not are you really that certain everything will work out as planned?
- Learning: does your plan include references to the many things you are likely to have learnt as an organisation over the last twelve months? Has your plan been built solely on historical pre-pandemic performance? If so, have you justified why that is appropriate?
- Wriggle room: have you allowed yourself some flexibility given the ongoing uncertainty in 2021/22?
Thank you to those people who have said that our business planning guidance has been helpful, hopefully this checklist will be too.
For some this will be a transformative plan, for others it may be more about incremental adaptation. Whichever approach you are taking make sure you are giving yourself time for ongoing review and revision. While the signs are looking positive, we still have a long way to go.
We wish you well for the year ahead.