The Operations Plan is a critical component of any business plan as it presents the Company’s action plan for executing its vision. The Operations Plan must detail 1) the processes that are performed to serve customers every day (short-term processes) and 2) the overall business milestones that the company must attain to be successful (long-term processes).

Everyday Processes (Short-Term Processes)

Every company has processes to provide its customers with products and services. For instance, Wall Mart has a unique distribution system to effectively move products from its warehouses to its stores, and finally to its customers’ homes. Technology products manufacturers have processes to convert raw materials into finished products. And service-oriented businesses have processes to identify new areas of customer interest, to continually update service features, etc.

The processes that a company uses to serve its customers are what transform a business plan from concept to reality. Anyone can have a concept. And more importantly, investors do not invest in concepts — they invest in reality. Reality is proving that the management team can execute the concept better than anyone else, and the Operations Plan is where the plan proves this by detailing key operational processes.

Business Milestones (Long-Term Processes)

The second piece of the Operations Plan is proving that the team will execute the long-term company vision. This is best presented as a chart. On the left side, there should be a list of the key milestones that the Company must reach, and on the right, the target date for achieving them. Sample milestones include expected dates when:

• New products and services will be introduced to the marketplace

• Revenue milestones will be attained (e.g., date when sales will surpass million dollar mark)

• Key partnerships will be executed

• Key customer contracts will be secured

• Key financial events will occur (future funding rounds, IPO, etc.)

• Key employees will be hired

Additional text should be used, where necessary, to support the projections laid out in the chart.

The milestone projections presented in the Operations Plan must be consistent with the projections in the Financial Plan. In both areas, it is important to be aggressive but credible. Presenting a plan in which the company grows too quickly will show the naiveté of the management team, while presenting too conservative a growth plan will often fail to excite the potential investor who will require a high rate of return over a relatively short time period.

- New products and services will be introduced to the marketplace

- Revenue milestones will be attained (e.g., date when sales will surpass million dollar mark)

- Key partnerships will be executed

- Key customer contracts will be secured

- Key financial events will occur (future funding rounds, IPO, etc.)

- Key employees will be hired

How To Get Your Contact Details Across: When The Organizers Won’t Let You

Have you ever spoken at an event and they won’t allow you to give your details? Have you gone on the radio and they forget to announce where you can be contacted?

If your contact details are left out or if you’re prevented from giving information, you’ll need to play the game a little smarter.

Understand that most reporters/radio announcers/organizers are quite accommodating. They understand that you’re giving your valuable time in exchange for the publicity. But often enough you’ll run into someone who’s power drunk or whose organization just won’t budge.

And here’s what I’ve done. And you can do too.

Refer to your product or service many times in the speech. Give an example and say how that particular example coincides with the example on Page 34 or Page 65. Or in the third CD of your 20 CD Workshop. Or the FREE Report you gave at the last event. As long as you’re making perfect sense, you will not be stopped or reprimanded. Your speech will meet the host’s guidelines, yet all the time you’re leaking out information.

By the end of the speech, you should have created enough leaks for the audience to be extremely curious. They’ll want to know about Page 34. They’ll want to know about the FREE Headline Report you gave at the last event.

As your fame grows, you may not need to do any of the above. If the organization doesn’t allow you to give your contact details you can refuse to do the interview/speech. However when you’re starting out, you may crave the additional publicity and that’s okay.

Be sure of one thing. Don’t let your speech be random. Create leaks and watch how the audience swarms around you after the event!

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Helmuth von Moltke once said “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” True enough. But it doesn’t stop the armed forces from planning for the future and analyzing all possible alternatives that may require different courses of implementation as roadblocks are encountered. A plan does not guarantee success because much to your chagrin, your enemy may be more organized. Or your enemy might implement their plan in a more structured and deliberate manner, thereby leaving no stone unturned on the path to victory. Make no mistake about it. If you are starting a business or are currently in business your competition creates a predatory environment. Everyone’s resources are limited. Competition sees you as a threat. Only those that can plan and can implement that plan while being flexible to a changing business world will survive.
Whether you need financing or not, whether you are a start up or a successful 3 year old business, if you do not crystallize your vision of future success and detail how you will achieve your goals, then how can you communicate this vision to others? How can you reach customers and ask them to buy from you? How can you convince lenders and investors to loan you their money? How can you put in place specific actions to grow?
The starting point for building the overwhelming desire to achieve outstanding results in business is to set an objective that truly inspires. In order to achieve any goal you will need to make decisions and trade-offs regarding the business operations that stairstep toward your goal. If your goal is not clear in your own mind, making such decisions and trade-offs will be difficult if not impossible. To summarize, the process of building a business begins by visualizing the business as you want to be. Then you must identify the marketing strategies, costs, operational processes, and human resource requirements that you need to establish, eliminate, or improve upon if your ideal business is to be created or is to grow.
Many times people ask about outsourcing a business plan or buying software samples of business plans. These services claim to save time and seem to make the process easier. But a successful plan is not so much about format or subheadings. What is important is the process of creating the plan. Now please don’t misunderstand me and think I said a business plan does not have to be detailed; quite the opposite. In order to successfully launch a company or to grow from year 3 to year 4 your plan should be very detailed in every aspect, especially when formulating financial projections. The plan cannot be ambiguous. It must be factual and while developing the plan, you should be uncovering facts. Remember it’s you along with your team developing the goals, strategy and action plan that will provide a GPS to success. You can’t be thinking about the color of your business cards or whether you should develop a brochure much less what goes into it once you are open for business and trying to generate sales and pay bills.
Many entrepreneurs are too busy to develop a plan or if you are starting a business you might not know what goes into a business plan. In my experience, if you meet lender qualifications, plans that win funding come from a true collaboration between a skilled consultant/facilitator and the entrepreneur’s team of employees and advisors. Working together the entrepreneur and the advisor/counselor can take all the pieces and make the final plan into a readable, accessible document that will stand up to investor/lender scrutiny.
Sure there have been many successful businesses that have not done a business plan. You hear a lot of people say it’s a pain to do a business plan. This can be true but the business plan is not the end. It’s the thought processes necessary to develop the plan that are important. To begin with, essentially a plan is reconnaissance. The plan will get to what is the opportunity, what are the alternatives, what’s a potential strategy for making it happen and that reconnaissance can be done pretty rapidly and insightfully. Therefore the business plan is a very valuable thing to do and in today’s fragile and unstable environment, why would you take a chance and just hope everything works out for the positive?

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