How Do You Create a Business Plan That Actually Gets You Somewhere?
When people talk about creating a business plan, they often mean a document. It might be something written for a bank, an investor or a funding application, full of market analysis, financial forecasts and carefully worded descriptions of what the business intends to become.
That's not the kind of business plan I'm talking about here.
I'm talking about the plan you actually use to run your business. The one that helps you decide what to do next, where to spend your time and money, which opportunities to pursue and, just as importantly, which ones to ignore.
For that, I think we've made business planning far more complicated than it needs to be.
I've written strategies for organisations for more than twenty years, and my starting point is usually remarkably simple. I want to understand where we are today, where we want to get to and what's stopping us from getting there. Once we understand those three things, we can work out what we need to do about them.
That's essentially the plan.
The difficulty isn't creating it. The difficulty is continuing to use it once the world starts changing around you.
Where is your business today?
Before deciding where you want to go, you need an honest picture of where you're starting from. That sounds obvious, but businesses aren't always particularly good at it.
It's tempting to begin a planning exercise by talking about ambition. We want to double turnover, enter a new market, build a bigger team or launch another product. Those conversations are more exciting than examining what's happening today, but without understanding your starting position, it's very difficult to create a credible route to somewhere else.
That doesn't mean spending months analysing the business. For a smaller company, the important questions are usually quite straightforward. What are you turning over? Where does the revenue come from? Which products or services are performing well? Where are you losing customers? What capacity does the team have? What is profitable? What isn't? What seems to be working and where are you struggling?
Some of the answers will be numbers. Others will require judgement. The objective isn't to produce the world's most comprehensive analysis of your company. It's to establish an honest "You are here" marker.
You can't navigate anywhere until you know your starting point.
Where do you actually want to go?
This is where a lot of business plans become vague.
"Grow the business" isn't really a destination. Neither is "increase sales", "become more profitable" or "build a great team". They're all perfectly sensible ambitions, but they don't tell you what you're actually trying to build.
A useful destination needs enough definition that you would recognise it when you got there.
Perhaps you want to build a £5 million business within five years. Perhaps you want a company that can operate without you being involved in every decision. You might want to enter the US market, move from project revenue towards recurring revenue, build a company you can eventually sell or simply create a more profitable business that gives you back some of your time.
There isn't a universally correct destination. That's one of the reasons I don't believe AI should be setting strategy for us. Choosing where you want to take a business involves ambition, values, appetite for risk and often deeply personal choices about the life you want alongside it.
AI can help you explore those choices, but ultimately somebody has to decide where the business is going.
That's leadership.
What's stopping you from getting there?
Once you know where you are and where you want to go, the most useful part of planning begins.
Look at the gap between the two.
What's stopping you?
If you want to double revenue, perhaps you don't have enough sales opportunities entering the pipeline. If you want to expand internationally, perhaps you don't understand the new market well enough. If you want the business to operate without you, perhaps too much knowledge and decision-making still sits in your head. If you want to increase profitability, perhaps your pricing, product mix or cost base is getting in the way.
These are the problems your plan needs to solve.
I think this is where planning becomes much more useful than the traditional exercise of creating a long list of objectives. Rather than asking, "What would we like to do this year?", you're asking, "What needs to change for us to reach the destination we've chosen?"
The difference matters because it gives activity a purpose. Hiring someone, implementing a CRM, launching a marketing campaign or developing a new product aren't strategies in themselves. They only become strategically important when they remove something that's preventing you from getting where you want to go.
How do you turn business goals into a plan?
Once you've identified what's standing in the way, the plan becomes relatively straightforward. Decide what needs to change, what you're going to do about it, who is responsible and how you'll know whether it's working.
If the problem is insufficient sales pipeline, the plan might involve improving lead generation, developing partnerships or changing the sales proposition. If customer churn is preventing growth, the priority might be understanding why customers leave and improving retention before spending more money acquiring new ones. If the founder is the bottleneck, the plan might focus on delegation, systems and building leadership capability.
This is why two businesses with exactly the same revenue target can have completely different plans. Their destination might be similar, but their starting positions and the obstacles in their way aren't.
A good business plan connects those things. It isn't simply a collection of projects you'd quite like to complete.
It is a route from where you are to where you want to be.
Do you need to know the entire route before you start?
No, and I think this is where businesses can waste an enormous amount of time.
There is comfort in planning. If we can create the perfect three-year strategy, model every scenario and anticipate every problem, it can feel as though we've removed some of the uncertainty from running a business.
We haven't.
The market will change. A competitor will do something unexpected. A new technology will appear. Customers will behave differently. Somebody will leave. An opportunity you hadn't considered will emerge.
That's why I wouldn't spend months trying to design the perfect route before leaving the driveway.
Know where you are. Be clear about where you're going. Understand the biggest things currently standing in your way and decide what you're going to do about them.
Then get moving.
You'll learn more once you start travelling than you ever could sitting still trying to predict the entire journey.
Why do business plans stop working?
The problem with many business plans isn't that they were bad when they were written. It's that they're treated as though nothing will change afterwards.
Imagine planning a drive from London to Edinburgh. You could work out the entire route before leaving and print the directions onto several sheets of paper. Provided nothing unexpected happened, you'd probably get there.
But if an accident closed the motorway halfway through the journey, blindly following the original plan would be ridiculous. The destination hasn't become wrong simply because the route has.
Modern satellite navigation solves this by separating the destination from the route. You decide where you want to go, but the system continually monitors what's happening around you and suggests changes when a better route becomes available.
I think businesses need to think about planning in the same way.
Your goals provide direction. Your plan gives you an initial route. From there, you need to keep paying attention.
That's the difference between planning and Strategic Navigation.
When does planning become Strategic Navigation?
Strategic Navigation begins once the journey is underway.
A plan is based on what you know at a particular point in time. Navigation asks whether what you've subsequently learnt should change what you do next.
Has a new competitor appeared? Has customer demand changed? Is an initiative performing better or worse than expected? Has new technology created an opportunity that didn't exist when you wrote the plan? Is there a partnership that could get you to your destination faster? Has one of your original assumptions proved to be wrong?
None of those things necessarily mean changing your strategy. They may simply mean changing your route.
That's an important distinction because businesses sometimes confuse agility with constantly changing direction. Being agile doesn't mean chasing every new idea that appears. If anything, having a clear destination makes it easier to say no to distractions because you have something against which to judge them.
The question becomes: Does this help us get where we're trying to go?
If it doesn't, it might be a perfectly good opportunity for somebody else. It just isn't part of your journey.
How can AI help with business planning?
This is where I think AI becomes much more interesting than simply asking ChatGPT to write a business plan.
A large language model can certainly help you create a plan. Give it enough context and it can analyse information, challenge assumptions, suggest options and help you think through what might be preventing you from achieving your goals.
I use AI for exactly those things.
But once the plan exists, there's another job to do. Somebody needs to keep looking at what's changing around the business and asking whether any of it matters to the journey.
That's where proactive AI can help.
Rather than waiting for you to know which question to ask, AI can monitor competitors, markets, performance, technology, risks and opportunities in the background. When something changes, it can investigate what it means and give you the evidence to decide whether the route needs adjusting.
It doesn't need to decide where the business is going, and it shouldn't make the final judgement about whether you change course.
Those remain human decisions.
The opportunity is to give leaders much better visibility of the road ahead.
How Syncity AI turns a plan into a journey
This is the thinking behind Syncity AI.
We start with the destination. What are you trying to achieve, what are your goals and how will you measure progress?
Then our AI Scouts continuously look for opportunities, risks and changes that could affect that journey. When they find something relevant, they investigate it and build the evidence around it so that you're not simply presented with another interesting idea.
You can then decide whether that opportunity removes one of the obstacles between where you are and where you want to be. If it does, you can accept it, turn it into action and track what happens next. If it doesn't, you can dismiss it and keep moving.
The plan therefore doesn't disappear into a drawer after the annual strategy day. It becomes something you continually navigate against.
That's much closer to how I think businesses actually work.
A business plan should help you move
If you're trying to create a plan for your business, I'd resist the temptation to begin with templates, frameworks or a request for AI to write one for you.
Start with four questions.
Where are we now?
Where do we want to go?
What's stopping us from getting there?
What are we going to do about it?
You can make the planning process considerably more sophisticated later if you need to. But if you can answer those questions properly, you've already got the foundations of something useful.
Then start moving.
Because the purpose of a business plan isn't to predict every turn you'll take over the next five years. It's to give you enough direction to take the next step with confidence, while remaining flexible enough to change the route when the world inevitably changes around you.
A plan gives you a route. Strategic Navigation helps you keep finding the best route to your destination.