Business Planning & Improvement
A plan you’ll use. Not a document you’ll file.
Most business plans get written once, for a bank, and never opened again.
They’re long, they’re full of assumptions nobody tested, and they have no mechanism for telling you whether anything in them happened. As a document it’s fine. As a way of running a business it’s useless. What we build is shorter, has numbers attached, and gets looked at again.
Attach a target, a responsible person and a review date to the work.
Why owners arrive here
Planning by instinct stops working at a certain size
For a long time, running the business in your head works.
You know roughly what things cost, roughly what you can charge, and roughly who’s pulling their weight. Then you add staff, or a second location, or a product line, and the rough answers stop being good enough.
That’s usually the point owners arrive here — not in crisis, just aware that the instincts have stopped keeping up.
Three stages
What the work involves
The third is the one that makes the difference, and it’s the one almost everyone skips.
Stage 01
Establish where you actually are
Real margins by job, client or service line. Where the money goes. Which parts of the business are subsidising which. Most owners find at least one genuine surprise here.
Stage 02
Build the plan
What the business is aiming at, what has to be true for that to happen, and what each piece is worth. Targets that are measurable, and few enough to remember.
Stage 03
Hold it to the plan
Reviewed on a set cycle against actual numbers, revised where reality has moved, and chased where it hasn’t. This is the part almost everyone skips, and it’s the only part that changes outcomes.
Discrete programs
Sometimes the issue isn’t the plan
It’s one specific thing in the business that doesn’t work and never has.
These are discrete pieces of work with a measurable before and after. We’d usually rather fix one of these properly than write a plan that assumes it away.
- Pricing
A price list that hasn’t moved in three years while costs have.
- Quoting
A process that loses money on every second job, because the estimate rests on assumptions that stopped being true.
- Overheads
Costs that grew with revenue during a good year and never came back down.
- Debtors
Invoices nobody chases until they’re ninety days old.
What you get
Short, measurable, and chased
- A written plan you’ll re-read
Short enough that you actually will, rather than long enough to satisfy a bank.
- Financial targets tied to operational ones
So you can see whether it’s working, rather than hoping that it is.
- A set review cycle
Monthly or quarterly, against real numbers rather than recollection.
- Improvement actions with an owner and a date
Specific enough that it’s obvious when one hasn’t happened.
- An honest read on what isn’t working
Including anything you’d rather not hear.
Four findings
Problems we see constantly
None of these are exotic. All of them are invisible from inside, because revenue still looks fine while the margin quietly moves.
- Pricing that hasn’t moved
Costs have risen every year and the price list hasn’t. The margin erosion is invisible because revenue still looks fine. This is the single most common finding, and usually the most valuable to fix.
- Quoting that loses money on one type of job
Not all jobs — one category, consistently, because the estimate was built on assumptions that stopped being true. Owners often sense which type and have never proved it.
- Overheads that grew and never came back
Easy to add during a good year, hard to see once they’re embedded, and rarely reviewed line by line.
- Debtors nobody chases until ninety days
Every week of average debtor days is working capital you’ve lent your customers for free, and it’s usually a process problem rather than a customer problem.
Illustrative trend: rising costs narrow the space beneath an unchanged selling price.
Timeframe
Four to six weeks to diagnose and plan
The review cycle runs as long as it’s useful. A discrete improvement program — fixing pricing, or rebuilding the quoting model — is usually shorter and has a much clearer before and after.
Sounding Board SolutionsIf what you need is ongoing CFO-level support rather than a planning engagement.
A distinction worth making
How this differs from business coaching
If you want both, plenty of our clients have a coach as well. They do different jobs.
Frameworks, accountability and someone checking in on you. Some of it is very good, and plenty of our clients have a coach as well.
We start from the risk and value drivers and work outward, because a plan that isn’t anchored to the numbers is just a set of intentions.
Industry BenchmarkingUseful before planning, because it tells you which of your numbers are actually a problem.
Start with a consultation
Tell us what’s not working.
If it’s a discrete problem we’ll say so, rather than selling you a planning engagement to solve it.
Book a consultationAnd if the honest answer is that your numbers aren’t reliable enough to plan from yet, we’ll say that too. Planning on bad data produces confident decisions in the wrong direction, which is worse than no plan at all.