Your 12 Month Business Plan

A 12-month business plan is one of the key essentials to have and to refer to regularly. It’s an accountability tool that will keep you on track for the year ahead. You’ll use it to measure your performance against it and see how well you’re doing.

How do you create a 12-month business plan?

• Be clear on your business vision and where you’re taking your business long term. 
• Do your planning and know what you want to achieve in your business in the next 12 months. 
• Break it down into smaller segments – quarters – so the action list doesn’t seem so daunting. 

Business Vision

Before you start creating your 12-month business plan, you need to get really clear on your longer-term business vision. Where are you going as a business and why? What’s meaningful for you to create as the business owner?

Plan

You’ll then want to do your year ahead planning by having a look at several key categories that you need to consider as you move your business forward:

1. Clients - Think about who your clients are and who you want them to be. Ask yourself how you can reach your ideal clients and what it takes to retain them. Also, if you think about your desired revenue in the next 12 months, what does that look like in terms of clients? Do you need to get more?
2. Team - The next thing you want to look at is your team. Is your team complete? Do you need to hire new team members to be able to achieve those 12-month goals? Can they perform well, or perhaps they need additional training?
3. Your role - Let’s not forget about you. When planning, consider what your role in the business will look like in the next 12 months. Will you be doing more strategic tasks? What will you focus on?
4. Sales – Look at your revenue & your revenue goals. You’ll want to calculate how much work you need to win to hit those revenue numbers you’re aiming for. In addition, you should think about your sales process - is it a smooth one? If not, which areas do you need to improve?
5. Marketing - Streamline your marketing. What’s going to be effective in terms of helping make more sales. Then strategise i.e. consider how much marketing you need to do and which platforms you want to use. Write a list of the things you want to do in the marketing space.
6. Admin & Ops – Review if your operations and admin enable efficiency. Do you need to hire additional staff to help you with the operational side of your business? Do you want to set up a library of resources that will make project delivery a breeze?
7. Vision, Strategy and Growth - As you’re already clear on your vision, think about how to get there. What does growth look like for your company? 

Carefully go over all these areas and identify what’s working for your business at the moment, and what needs improvement.

Individual Quarters

After you’ve compiled a list of all the things laid out above, it’s time to break things down into quarters. By doing so, you’ll get crystal clear on the things that will be your goals for each individual quarter. 

An additional benefit to think in quarters is that the targets you’ve set look and feel less intimidating.

To summarise, setting up your 12-month business plan is a really important exercise. It will give you a sense of direction and will act like a checkpoint list on your business journey. You’ll know what the things you need to do are, and also when to do them.

So, create your plan, and place it somewhere visible so that you can remind yourself at all times where your focus needs to be for each quarter, and to check whether things are moving along according to plan.

If you’d like to learn more, please take a look at my most recent podcast episode on this exact topic:

Click here for the podcast episode.

Click here to watch the video.

Josh ‘12 Month Plan’ Stone

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