Action International's 90-Day Business-Planning Workshop

With about 80 percent of new businesses failing within five years and 80 percent of the surviving 20 percent failing within 10 years, more and more evidence supports the importance of business planning. That's the message participants received at a recent workshop sponsored by the Louisville Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Action International, a business coaching company, facilitated the hands-on workshop. Business owners learned how to kick-start their businesses using a 90-day planning template that breaks the business down into "Six Steps to a Better Business." Facilitators Rachel and Tom Butler explained to participants that these key areas can help business owners create an executable plan that gets results.

The facilitators said that every business owner starts his or her business with some results in mind. What often happens is that owners get stuck working in day-to-day operations and don’t get to the planning and measuring that lead to the results they originally went into business to achieve.

The six steps that participants developed their plans around were:

1. Mastery… Going from chaos to control. As a first step, participants learned about planning to grow profits, taking control of margins and cashflow, making sure the delivery process is focused on customer satisfaction, taking back control of time, spending time working on the business and doing the right things for the business.

2. Niche… Understanding and leveraging what the business is best at, which will allow the business to generate sustained cash flow and profitability. Participants discussed how to focus on the products and services that improve the number and quality of customers. The facilitators emphasized the importance of increasing profits from each customer relationship.

3. Leverage… Increasing accountability, more disciplined systems and business accelerators. As part of this step, participants learned how to plan for a transition from people-reliance to systems-reliance. Systems help talented people make the best use of themselves and members of their team to achieve sought-after business results.

4. Team… As growth and hard work begins to pay off, results are measurable—it’s time to sustain the transformation. When the first three steps are under control, the results and momentum can be measured. As they planned for step No. 4, participants committed themselves to continue building and aligning the teams that will ultimately run their companies with a higher level of commitment and motivation.

5. Synergy… The team is committed to the common vision and goals of the organization. In this phase, roles and responsibilities are complete and understood. Leadership tools and metrics are in place. Participants made plans for their teams to capitalize on the qualities of all employees to sustain the performance of their organizations as they achieve "massive results."

6. Results… Now it’s all running and the team is better able to plan and manage the growth. Planning for the final step, participants discussed what to do when operational and tactical operations are running smoothly. Now that everything works, it's time to do it bigger, better or in more locations... all while the owner is guiding the business, coaching the team, and leveraging the systems and the company to achieve the original vision.

Participants learned not only from the facilitators, but from each other as they shared and gave each other candid feedback. “I received the key steps to get us where we wanted to go,” one participant said. Another noted that "results require planning. I learned a lot of key strategies that will help me maintain and grow my business.”

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