Sarah Joy - The Strategic Planning Workbook for Small Businesses and Sole Proprietors: A NO-NONSENSE APPROACH THAT CUTS THROUGH THE CRAP AND GETS YOUR BUSINESS BACK ON TRACK QUICKLY (Planning Workbooks 1)

The Strategic Planning Workbook for Small Businesses and Sole Proprietors

A no-nonsense approach that cuts through the crap and gets your business back on track quickly

By Sarah Joy

This book is dedicated to my network of loving friends, colleagues and family. May your businesses be forever fruitful, and your lives blessed as you have blessed mine!

Copyright 2019 by Sarah Joy of Top Shelf Business Consulting

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, through this website:

Table of Contents

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Time and again, Ive sat down with a business owner to talk about a new idea, only to find out that they are finan- cially unstable and in trouble because they dont have a plan. I could throw in all the clichs (like if you fail to plan you plan to fail), but its not surpri- sing that most small businesses dont really have a plan. Planning is challenging, its wrought with complication, and a lot of the information out there is convo- luted and daunting. Small business owners are often driven by passion rather than simply an interest in business. They start a business that they care for, and often learn a lot of lessons as they go. So, when they hear they need a plan, they may try to write one. Or several. Only to get lost in the details and stuck on the semantics and then to discard the thing in a dra- wer because it does not make sense to the business. I totally get it.

Foreword

Welcome! And thank you for choosing the Strategic Planning Workbook!

I wrote this book to take the mystery, and the fear frustration and confusion, out of planning for your business. My goal is to make it both down to earth and accessible. You should be able to finish this in a month if you are serious and, in a weekend if you are truly diligent and bent on getting it done. Easy is one of the most misused words in the English language so I will not call it easy. But I will say this is concise, and cuts through much of what you dont need in a plan to help you focus on what you do.

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Strategic Planning for Small Businesses and Sole Proprietors

Foreword

This book has been crafted specifically for small business owners making under million and more likely less than million in top line revenue, with anywhere from sole proprietor up to about employees. (For those who are bigger, while there are takeaways in this text that are universal, you may need more in the way of details for bank and tax purposes, and this book may not be enough.) Its designed to be a workbook and to take you through a series of steps to make your own strategic plan, as in one you can actually use. Its simplified, as it should be, so that you can complete it quickly and get back to work.

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Strategic Planning for Small Businesses and Sole Proprietors

Foreword

Introduction READ ME FIRST!

Lets get started!

Strategic Plan

A DYNAMIC document that You the owner use as a tool to run your business. It is an internal document meant for you to work out issues and make mistakes on, not something you show to others like banks or investors.

Business Plan

A STATIC document that is used to secure funding from a bank or sell your business on paper. It is something that is prepared for others, after being very well edited, and should not be a place where you hammer out mistakes or new ideas. This is a final product that would be seen by banks, investors, a board, or sent for professional review.

This workbook is arranged in two parts. Part is a four-part series of foundation building. It is the precursor to strategic planning. First, we gather data about the business and the market. Once completed we then move to the actual planning phase in Part 2, a six-part series where we use the data from Part to form a path to success. Each of the chapters in both sections is a lesson with a corresponding activity section for you to start creating your own plan. Remember that this is

the meat and bones version. Its been stripped down of any excess and set up to get you thro- ugh in a concise amount of time. But you are not limited. You can add more. In any area, if you feel that you have more to include feel free to get creative. This book is designed to help you cre- ate the basic framework. It can be a standalone, or a foundation for the more elaborate. Both are correct. In every part of this book you are advi- sed and encouraged to make it work for you.

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Strategic Planning for Small Businesses and Sole Proprietors

Introduction READ ME FIRST!

For the purpose of this book we will reference the strategic plan and the business plan and distinguish between the two. Although the words sometimes get used interchangeably, and other authors may vary the definition, for this text there is a difference in two types of documents used to convey the plan for a business.

In essence, you use the strategic plan to make directional company decisions, and you use the material you create in the strategic plan to put together the business plan . They are very similar and contain many of the same elements and data. The key difference is that we are using one as an internal tool to help craft a plan that will change over time, and the other as a snapshot of a moment in time to communi- cate the value of the business to others.

These are the sections we will be inclu- ding in the plan we craft together. Its not an exhaustive list of what could go into a plan, but its been my experience that these key ele- ments can be plenty for a small business and its not always necessary to get more in-depth than what you will find in this workbook. But again, do more as you like.