Can Business Planning Ruin Your Business?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When coming of age at Melbourne University many years ago, Lygon Street was a favourite haunt. One of our regular restaurants was Il Gambero. Unfortunately, due to a recent fire, it is no more. While this is obviously, significant for me, why am I writing about it here?


What struck me particularly was an interview with Frank Di Mattina, the owner. He made a comment (see video) that I am sure would resonate with all small business owners.

“Unbelievably, the whole family… it was the first time we have been away from the business, we have been on a business planning seminar.”

This comment raises a number of questions.

Had they been in Melbourne, would the fire still have happened? Fire investigators believe it was started by an old $3 power board in the kitchen. The fire had started 40 minutes after the restaurant had closed for the night. So if they had been in Melbourne, the fire would probably have still occurred. It was an accident waiting to happen.

Would business planning have prevented the fire? The owners may well have done business planning before, but had they undertaken a business risk analysis and developed a risk reduction plan? For example, did they have as part of their plan regular electrical audits by a qualified electrician?

If they had a risk mitigation strategy and plan, was it followed? If it was not, was it because there was insufficient training or some other factor?

Should they ever leave their business again? They should be building a business that does not require them to be present all the time. There should be systems for all parts of their business supported by training, reports and audits to ensure compliance. If these elements are in place, they should be able to be absent from their business as often as they would like.

This is not the family’s only restaurant and I hope they will be back soon, if for no other reason, I just love their Scaloppini Funghi.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Hope is Not a Business Strategy

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

A record $90 million lottery has been announced for this week. Half the nation are buying tickets. Even my normally very sensible wife has asked me to buy a ticket, against my better judgement (although that is not the first time I have felt I have had to acquiesce to such things in the name of harmony at home, and I am sure it won’t be the last).

As someone who regards themselves as having good analytic skills, I find lotteries are an affront to commonsense. The only way they are commercially sustainable is that everyone on average loses. However with the odd ticket in a major jackpot and our annual flutter on the Melbourne Cup this is just a bit of fun for us. It is not our financial strategy. We are not banking on it to pay for our retirement, and our investment in it is petty cash, annually less than a nice night out.

Unfortunately, all too often, a lottery strategy is the one adopted by many business owners. That is something will turn up. One of their ads draw will draw in a whale customer. That their business gets profiled on a family talk show resulting in a huge surge of business. Maybe one time they do get lucky- but what happens next?

In most cases, not much. They blow their luck (like most lottery winners) and are back to where they started, because they were not prepared for it. They may have been depending on the luck, but didn’t expect it to happen.

Samuel Goldwyn once said to someone who commented that he had a lot of luck in his business “I agree and the harder I worked, the luckier I got”

Now that is the kind of luck upon which you can depend.

Luck starts with a vision, but doesn’t finish there. It must be backed with a plan. A vision without a plan is just a dream. How many of those have come true for you lately?

Your strategy is how you bridge the gap from your current state and your ultimate objective. So write out the key things you want to achieve in your business. This might be more profit or just more time off. Next describe your strategies for bridging these gaps. These would include your Marketing Strategy, your Business Structure or your Operations and People Strategy. If there are gaps you can’t bridge seek advice.

When you add an action plan to these strategies you have what I refer to as the Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

So with the new Financial Year just commencing, don’t just hope that next year will be better, plan for it.

Or just buy a lottery ticket and hope.

All you need to do now is to Empower yourself and take action ...

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Problem with Business Targets

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

We often hear about targets and deadlines being set by organisations and governments that are never met. Most recently, there have been targets set for CO2 emissions reduction. The initial target equates to 34% per person reduction, and yet others are demanding targets double that. Even the initial target is heroic. (For example, 90% of Victoria’s power generation is from brown coal.)

Before that, most of the developed world signed on to Kyoto targets, and most missed by miles.

What is the relevance of this to small business? When you have targets with no mechanism to reach them, it is meaningless. In the case of governments, they often set ambitious targets to appease their political constituency and the smart politician makes these targets big, but sets them a long time in the future, long after they expect to be out of office. It might help them win the next term which is where their focus generally is, but at some point, like the widely missed Kyoto targets, reality comes home to roost, and a price must be paid.

When we set targets without a plan, it is almost guaranteed that we will miss them. If the plan is to do research to discover the answer (the government’s plan) rather than rely on proven strategies, we need to expect that it will take much longer, and there is a chance that it won’t work at all. (Which is why the government just loves 2020!)

When we set targets in small business, they should be ambitious, but we must have a mechanism to achieve them. If our target is to increase sales by 30%, we must have a plan to achieve it. Do we have a plan to increase enquiries- maybe a new advertising channel, or an alliance? Is our intention to increase our conversion to sales by improving our sales pipeline, or providing sales training?

If we don’t know how to achieve the target, the strategy would be to go get advice from someone who knows what strategies work. (For the government, this is not an option as on-one knows!)

So for each of your key targets, write down where you are today, and where you want to be in 12 months. For each gap, create a strategy and for each strategy write a plan to implement the strategy.

If you find this difficult, please use my free Mission Statement Tool on the Resources page of www.FivePillarsBusinessSuccess.com Now is the time to set your targets for the next year, but make sure you have a plan to back it up!

May Your Business Be – As You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Who Needs a Business Plan?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Everyone in business knows you have to have a Business Plan, but very few have one. Most of those who do, haven’t updated it for years. So year after year people carry on with an out-of-date, or no business plan at all. In fact, they go on so long like this, they even convince themselves they don’t need one!

So let me ask a controversial question. Why have one at all? Aren’t they just an academic exercise? Pretty much everyone who doesn’t have a formal plan says: “I have a plan, its in my head” What’s wrong with that?

If you were going on a month long tour of Europe, would you be satisfied with a plan in your head? Or would you have a daily itinerary showing how you will be getting from place to place and where you would be staying each night. Would you create a budget to work out how you would pay for all this, and how much spending money you will need for meals and other expenses. Would you have a detailed listing of your bookings?

Only when you write all this down, might you see that you have left insufficient time to travel between stopovers, or spending too long in some places and not long enough at others. Then you would re-organise your itinerary until it was right, before you confirmed all the bookings.

Even if you do all that, you know things might still go wrong- planes delayed, connections missed, overbooking, etc. So you would put a little bit of extra money aside to cover such contingencies.

Your itinerary would also be marked for certain highlights that are must sees for you - the main reason for the trip, to make sure that you don’t return home and realise that you missed an opportunity while on tour.

In business it’s the same. The more you write down your goals and plans, the more likely it is you will identify gaps in desired outcomes and capability, and the opportunities you need to find, so that you don’t miss them when they arise.

Your Goals are Your Opportunity Finders

Due to the way our brains function, you only identify the gaps and see the opportunities when you write them down. So if you don’t write down your plans, there will be flaws that you will miss while it resides in your head, and you will miss the opportunities that will transform your business.

Now, if you are like most people, you will be saying “I know I should have a plan, but it takes so long to write out a plan, and if I hire someone to do it for me, it will also be expensive.” Several years back I wrote an article called: The Real Truth about Business Plans – What the Consultants don’t tell You! It will probably make you feel a little better, but only a little!

In summary, the article says that even when people produce a plan, they never update it or look at it again because it was such a major effort to produce it, and it was not seen as tool that they would use for their business every day.

A Business Plan in One Hour

What if you could produce a Business Plan in an hour, and it could fit on a single page? Does that sound like a plan you would be prepared to invest your time in and use? You wouldn’t even have to pay someone to do it for you. Well, that is what I am about to show you how to do now.

As for just about everything in life, the 80/20 rule applies to business as well. That is, 80% of the benefit of anything comes from 20% of the effort. The remaining 20% of value coming from an additional 80%. So if you have limited resources, it makes sense to at least to do the 20%! So now I will show you how to do that 20%. You can hire a consultant to do the other 80% if you want to later.

Find out how to create a One Hour Business Plan that fits on One Page in Issue 101 of the Small Business Achiever - The Business Owner Brief

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Year in Review

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

As the year draws to a close, it is an opportune time to have a look at the scorecard for your business. You know, the one you prepared at the beginning of this year with your 2007 goals? Did you have a scorecard with goals? How did you go?

If you did not have goals, the chances are, your results were much the same as last year and your business is pretty much where it was in 2006 and next year is looking like more of the same. This tends to be the result when you don’t set goals.

Maybe you did set goals. Did you have a plan to achieve the goals? If the answer to that question was no, the chances are you made some, but not all of your goals. The very fact that you wrote out your goals will have made a difference, because goals create a focus. However you also need a plan. That is, the steps you would take to achieve your goals. What strategies you would use, and the tactics you would employ to turn your goals into reality.

So, you had the goals, and a plan but still did not get the results you wanted? Did you actually carry out the plan? Did you track your performance against your plan? When you regularly refer back to your plan, you are far more likely to achieve your goals as this forces you to step back from the coalface and work on your business. When performance was less than expected, did you adjust the plan? While persistence is a virtue in business, the same cannot be said for hitting your head against a brick wall. Perhaps there was an easier way? Did you seek advice when things were not working? While there is a cost to getting advice, even if it is just your time, the cost of trial and error is many times higher, and very demotivating.

If you did not achieve what you wanted to achieve in 2007, when look back on the year, and the goals, the plans, the actions, the tracking and the revisions is there something you didn’t do that would have made a difference? If you want 2008 to be different you must do something different.

The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again, and expect something different to happen. Make 2008 different. Find out how in:

The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success

May Your Business in 2008 be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

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Where to Start?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When looking at your business, is it like looking at one of those houses that real estate agents love to call: “a renovator’s delight”? You know, it is basically sound structurally, but the paint is peeling, cracks are showing and the garden is a mess. It does not need a huge amount of effort, just a bit of love and attention, some elbow grease and a bit of know-how. Or is it like a sapling with shoots growing everywhere but with no clear growth direction and shallow roots?

Whatever your business looks like, when seeking to renovate or prune it into shape, the question is where to start? Should it be on your marketing or your systems, or perhaps your website or sales? The correct answer is to re-look at your goals so that every effort you make is taking your business in the direction you want it to go. Otherwise you will waste considerable time and money with unfocused strategies- scarce resources in small business. This is the difference between a light bulb and a laser beam which can cut through steel.

A systematic approach to renovating or pruning your business into shape is provided in the NEW book:

The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success

This book, which has a forward from Tony Steven, the CEO of COSBOA, the peak small business organisation in Australia, comes with a $100 of business tools, and provides an easy to understand, step-by-step approach on how to improve your business, starting with your goals, right through to systems and sales.

When you truly understand where your business is going, the job of defining a marketing strategy and putting in place systems becomes much simpler. Without this understanding, every day is a battle for survival, a hand to mouth existence. With it, every strategy you implement is about creating an unassailable position for your business in the marketplace.

Please visit Five Pillars for more information on “The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success”

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

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The Fifth Pillar

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Most readers of this blog will already be aware of the

Four Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success

The first version of this, as my longest and most loyal subscribers know, was only 10 pages. It was, to be honest, a piece of marketing hype. Then I created a new version of this book which was a 10,000 word marketing brochure, although it contained some real content, unlike the first version. Many subscribers have complimented me on the quality of the information of this eBook, which if you have not received your own copy, can be downloaded FREE from the link above.

Some have told me they have taken the eBook as a blueprint for their business. Maybe I provided too much information to these successful people, as they never actually engaged me as their coach, relying only on the information in the eBook. However, I am always very happy to share what I know. My philosophy has always been the more you give, the more your receive.

While the feedback from this eBook has been extremely positive, I have been dissatisfied to the extent, that while the information was very highly valued, it did not result in action by owners to improve their businesses as often as I would have liked. So this year, I decided to move from the virtual world with a physical book that describes in some detail, the action Business Owners need to take. This book is called:

The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

One extra Pillar! The Fifth Pillar is the missing piece in the puzzle. The piece that makes the difference between thinking about success, and being successful. The book is several times the length of the original and provides a step-by-step plan for Business Success. It is due to be published in September.

To find out more about the book, you can either watch out for further information on this blog or contact me directly.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

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Diary of a New Business 10 - The Workflow Process

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

No business can survive without processes and procedures. But when starting a new business, detailed processes can often wait and evolve as the business grows. The initial way of doing things is rapidly replaced with a better way of doing things. So spending a lot of time on systems before you launch can result in unnecessary delays in your launch. Afterall, when you start, you are generally not that busy, so many of your systems can grow with your business.

That is not to say that you can’t start without any systems. You must have some idea on how you are going to provide your services. The fundamentals must be in place. But if you intend to automate things, quite detailed planning is necessary.

With a manual process, you don’t have to think about every contingency. If something only happens rarely, you can take the view that you will address the process for that when the time arises. But if you intend to automate your systems, the logic of what happens next has to be considered so that the automation can handle it.

As the Australian Business Coaching Club was to be largely automated, the steps for each visitor to the website had to be considered one-by-one. The visitor decides to optin- but fills in the form incorrectly. If there is not an error checking process, I could lose a lead. Here are some other questions that I asked:

· What are the steps a visitor must take to a sale?
· What are the automated follow-ups?
· What alternatives should be given and managed?
· What payment options?
· How to manage a failed credit card?
· How to welcome people to the Club?
· What happens at each stage of their membership?
· What is the induction process?
· How is their membership managed?
· Are there loyalty and referral programs?
· How do they work and how are they managed?
· What happens when they resign?
· What happens after they resign?

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the coaching process! How much automation should be given to each aspect of the business?

A map was created from the first contact through to the final goodbye. Even where automation was undertaken, emails had to be prewritten, which would be triggered by the process. Web pages needed to be created where there were to be links from the emails. And reporting had to be in place to monitor the whole process.

While a large number of procedures were automated, some manual processing was maintained where the programming was considered to be very complex and saving little time or where it was believed that the process would evolve.

Before you launch your business, map out the fundamental processes that must be there the day the doors open.

Next- Getting it all done.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog

Diary of a New Business- 9. The Implementation Plan

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Up to this point there had been considerable thought about the concept of the new business and selecting who I was going to get involved to develop it. The plan up to now had been focused around these issues, with the detail of how it was to be done still only described at high level. The implementation of the business strategy was little more than a series of milestones.

In order to make the business happen, I started to list out all the key tasks that had to be completed prior to launch. Against each task, I listed a person responsible for delivering on the task, and its completion date.

For many of the external tasks, the specification was still incomplete. This was more work for me! Part of the process was understanding the dependencies of the tasks. While it was obvious in many cases that the horse goes before the cart, in many others, particularly when I was co-ordinating the inputs of 2-3 others, this became more complex. In some of the more technical areas, I placed the responsibility on experts to do the co-ordination, but I still wanted to retain overall control of the project.

Co-ordinating the marketing strategy and the technical elements of the website was the biggest challenge. A certain look and feel was essential, but there were costs associated with what was required.

While the business requirements of the website had been well defined, there were technical details that needed further specification. Often what seemed like a simple request, required a large amount of coding, or had major implications on maintenance. So some hard decisions had to be made on the level of automation and functionality, while still keeping the original vision in place.

The equation was- more automation- higher upfront cost, less automation- more maintenance and higher running costs. Add into this mix, a high investment in automation at the beginning of a new business where the processes had yet to be tested might incur later costs as these processes were re-written in light of operational experience. It would always be possible to automate manual tasks later if they became burdensome. The economic benefit would be obvious at the time. But it was still clear that there would be a need for a significant amount of automation to make the business easier to run.

Part of the original vision was that the service being offered was to be priced at a low enough level as to create a new market, but it was not to be subsidised by my existing business. Therefore running costs had to be kept low.

There were also some pleasant surprises as well. Often, what I thought might be technically difficult was quite straight forward due to the technical platform used by my web designer.

All through this detailed specification process, the original definition and clarity of vision was absolutely crucial. It was always clear to me what compromises I could make and which ones were non-negotiable. If I had not completed that work initially, the business would have become badly flawed – held together by digital band aids and elastic bands- and looking like that to my potential clients.

Before you plan your business, a clear vision of what the business will look like is absolutely critical.

Once the key specifications had been completed, there remained an additional specification step- tp fully specify the business processes- which required the defining the offline and online interfaces.


The next article in Diary of a Business will be: Detailing Workflow Processes

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is a Business Coach and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems.

The Australian Small Business Blog