Do I need a business plan?
Yes. Businesses with a plan consistently outperform those without one, and the gap is big. In an Australian study, the one in five companies that have a plan hit 76% of their year-one goals, and a US study of 11,000 companies found planners outperformed the rest by 48%. A plan forces you to visualise where you’re going and sharply improves your odds of getting there.
Why does business planning matter?
Business planning matters because the businesses that do it measurably outperform the ones that don’t. In Australia, four in five companies have no plan (SME Research Report 2017/18, Bstar). Yet, seven out of ten fast-growing companies, the ones doubling top-line sales year on year, have a plan (Upton, Teal & Felan, Journal of Small Business Management, 2001), even though at that pace stopping to plan feels like the last thing you’d do. And a US study of 11,000 companies in the early 2000s split them into plan and no-plan groups: the planners outperformed by 48% (Ding & Hursey, University of Oregon, 2010). It’s the same principle Olympic long, triple and high jumpers use standing at the top of the runway, eyes closed, visualising the perfect jump, and athletes who visualise perform better 45% of the time (Driskell, Copper & Moran, Journal of Applied Psychology, 1994). Write the plan, picture where you’re heading, and you tilt the odds in your favour.
What should you include in a business plan?
Nearly every business plan template (and there are hundreds online, from banks to governments) shares the same core elements, so start there: the market context and macro trends shaping your industry; your target audience and customers; your competitors, and more importantly how you’re different from them; your purpose, vision, mission, values and culture; your key offering; your growth plan; and your priorities. The trap is that once you see all those boxes, the temptation is to fill every one and end up overwhelmed. The fix is to ladder the elements together into a single story. Storytelling your strategy simply, in plain language, is what lets the whole organisation, not just the exec team, understand it and get behind it. If you can’t tell it simply, it’s too complicated to execute.
Is a SWOT analysis worth doing?
Controversially, not as the centrepiece people make it. SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) has its place, but when you’re trying to build a concise, useful plan there are more meaningful ways to reach the same answers. Take strengths: understanding your genuine differentiators, meaning why a customer picks you over a competitor, tells you far more than a generic list of things you’re good at. Opportunities usually fall out of proper macro analysis of the economy and where it’s heading, so you’ve effectively already covered them. It’s not that you should never run a SWOT; it’s that it isn’t the holy grail some people treat it as. Put the time into differentiation and macro trends instead, and you’ll feed sharper inputs into your strategy.
What do most business plan templates leave out?
Three things, and they’re often the most important. First, strategic partners: many companies depend on a tech, logistics or commercial partner to succeed, yet almost no template asks about them. Tied to that is single-supplier risk: are you reliant on one supplier or partner whose collapse would seriously hurt you? That belongs in every plan. Second, storytelling: being able to explain your strategy simply enough to pass the “barbecue test”: if someone asks what your company does, can you tell the story in about 30 seconds, in plain language? Third, visualisation: being able to picture your plan and recall it easily, the way a student highlights key points so they can close their eyes in the exam and remember them. Templates capture the structure; these three make the plan stick.
How 24HRBP approaches this
The 24 Hour Business Plan process is built to get all of this done in a single day, laddering the core elements into one clear, story-told plan you can actually remember and act on, rather than a document that fills every box and then sits in a drawer.
Watch the full episode on The 24HR Business Plan Podcast: Episode 1 - Why Business Planning Matters
