Strategic Planning for an SME, On One Page

Here is a version that fits on one page and gets used.

The five questions

1. What are we actually good at, that customers pay for?

Not what you would like to be good at. Ask your best customers why they use you. The answer is often not what you assumed, and it is the most useful sentence in the whole exercise.

2. Who is the customer we want more of?

Specific. Not "SMEs in the UAE". The profile of the customers who are profitable, stay, and do not consume disproportionate time.

Get this from your own numbers. Revenue by customer, less the cost of serving them.

3. What are we going to stop doing?

The question that makes it a strategy rather than a wish list.

Every plan without a stop list is an addition to an already full year, and it fails for that reason alone.

4. What has to be true for this to work?

Assumptions, written down. We can hire two people. Our largest customer stays. Prices hold.

Writing these down lets you check them later, and tells you which to watch.

5. What would tell us it is not working?

Decided in advance, before you are attached to the plan.

The financial check on each

Every strategic choice has a number behind it, and the number is usually available.

More of a customer type: what is the margin on them, after the cost of serving them?

Stopping a line: what costs genuinely disappear, as opposed to moving to the other lines?

Growth: what is the cash gap per job, multiplied by the volume you plan?

A hire: what does the role produce, and how long to competence?

A plan that has not had these calculated is a set of intentions.

Why one page

Because it gets read.

A thirty page document is a project that ends when the document is finished. One page gets looked at quarterly, which is the only version that changes anything.

The quarterly review

Fifteen minutes.

Are the assumptions still true?
Did we stop what we said we would stop?
What do the numbers say about the customer type we chose?

Most plans fail not because they were wrong but because nobody looked at them again.

The most common failure

Planning to grow without planning the cash.

Growth consumes cash before it produces it. A plan to double revenue with no funding plan is a plan to run out of money at twice the speed.

Where we fit

We produce the numbers behind the five questions. Customer profitability, margin by line, cash requirement for the growth. Send your management accounts and the plan.