A Business Plan is Your Roadmap, Make Sure it’s Easy to Read

RCS Influencer Mike Pickel says that business plans should be concise with a clear vision for where you want your business to go.

Many entrepreneurs put together business plans that, when finished, can be many pages long. So long in fact that it becomes easy to just set it to the side where it gathers dust and isn’t thought about again. That’s why when we put our plan together, we wanted to make sure that it was short, concise and provided a clear vision for where we want our business to be in the future.

We used the Vision/Tracker Organizer™ to develop our business plan and it’s two simple pages. Just because the finished plan is only two pages doesn’t mean that it was easy to develop. We had to sit down with our leadership team and really work through our goals, hopes and dreams for the business. If you start by brainstorming and putting everything out there, you can begin to narrow it down to a simpler format using your existing business data, financial information and feedback and input from your people.

The first page of the plan is our vision page. It’s where we identify our company core values and our core focus of serving people with a passion and providing seamless roof service. We also define our target market and three things that make us unique versus other roofing contractors. The vision page clearly states our 10-year target and the proven process to meet this target.

We also include a 3-year picture snapshot that outlines where we will be in terms of revenue and profit and how we will measure success – using numbers that clearly define it – how many roof replacements how many commercial billable hours, etc. 

The second page is our traction page. This is where we define our one-year plan and spell out where we want our revenue and profit to be at the end of 2020. We also identify five goals that we want to achieve over the next year.  The last step for success if to work from this document on a regular basis. We review it at a minimum annually, but since it is so concise and spells out everything clearly, it’s very conducive to a quick monthly check in to see how we are doing and if adjustments need to be made.

Mike Pickel is co-founder of Texas Traditions Roofing. See his full bio here.