SCORE Small Business Blog

The “Real” Questions Your Biz Plan Should Answer

Taking lots of time to carefully map out your business vision is totally overrated. Many entrepreneurs can write detailed business plans that describe where their company is going. Once a year, they even go “off site” for a day to refine that vision and reformulate their strategies. I know since I lead a lot of these sessions.

Let’s be realistic. While this may be a worthwhile, infrequent activity, it’s really just a bunch of meaningless mumbo-jumbo we tell ourselves in order to:

1. Raise capital from outside investors.
2. Give us a spark when things are looking bleak.

The only three “vision things” your company needs are the answers to the following questions:

1. What pain does your company solve?
2. Who has the money to solve that pain?
3. How will prospects learn about your company’s products?

But these ideas are meaningless without successful execution of planned tactics. Every entrepreneur needs to write down the three critical success factors (CSFs) that need to happen this week or this month to achieve your company vision.

For example, my CSFs for last week were:

Finish and practice my speech for the Jamaica Employers Federation conference (part of the “paid to speak vision”)
Write all of the weekly blog posts for my different sites before I leave town on Thursday night (part of the “paid to write vision”)
Prepare the content for the full day Business Unstuck Series(part of the “paid to speak without traveling vision”)

When additional tasks came up during the week, I filtered them through my three CSFs. I always answer this question: “If I completed that task now, would it contribute to the completion of one of the CSFs?” If yes, I did it. If no, I postponed it until the three CSFs were complete.

Go ahead. You can do the business vision thing while I am growing my business and executing the tactics that get me closer to my goal.

Barry Moltz – Speaker, Consultant & Author With decades of entrepreneurial experience in his own business ventures, Barry has discovered the formula to get stuck business owners out of their funk and marching forward. He has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. He is the author of three small business books. www.barrymoltz.com | Facebook | @BarryMoltz | More from Barry