At first, I wanted to call this text “Why a business plan is needed,” but why should I limit myself? Plan - he and the plan in Africa, no matter what. The one for business is called a business plan. The one that is for evacuation is called, oddly enough, an evacuation plan. And so on.

But the idea of ​​the text did come from the area where business plans are relevant. Often began to meet with statements that "a business plan, of course, is needed, but specifically in our case, it will not bring benefit because":

1. we have too much uncertainty, there will be a guessing in the coffee grounds;
2. and so everything is very clear, the plan is a waste of energy.

I myself also suffered from these cockroaches, but it so happened that from time to time various plans had to be made. And I want to tell you - making plans is useful and necessary.
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But first…

When the plan is not needed

A person can voluntarily do business only in two cases: when the result is important to him and when the process is important.

So, if the process is more important for you than the result, then you can score on the plan - have fun. In the case of the primacy of the process, all restrictions that can be imposed on your work are automatically dropped, since there is no need to achieve the result - your goal has already been achieved.

If you, like me, get pleasure from achieving the goal (or do not get it, but you have to), then the question of controlling a lot of nuances is acute: the expenditure of time, money and other resources, compliance with all sorts of criteria and so on. This is where planning comes to the rescue.

What is a plan?

First, it is important to understand that the plan consists not only of a list of items from 1 to 100, which must be completed in order. Moreover, it has parts that are much more important.

The goal - the most important element of any plan, then to achieve what it is created. The goal sets the point (or area) in the event space that we want to go to. In fact, it describes the total vector of effort that must be applied. The more precisely it is formulated (the better we see the goal), the more difficult it will be for us to perform actions that lead us away from it.

The criteria for achieving the goal are formal conditions, the fulfillment of which determines our approach to the goal. If the target is a point in multidimensional space, then the criterion is one of the coordinates of this point (or the coordinate interval). The more criteria we can identify and the more precisely they are, the better we see the goal.

Resources - time, money, employees, friends (yeah!), Bricks in the warehouse - everything that can be used to achieve the goal. It is important to define several sets of resources:

• all the resources you need to achieve the goal;
• resources that are initially;
• resources that we get in the process of implementing the plan.

Risks are things that can go wrong. In fact, not everything can go wrong, but some troubles tend to happen more often than others. These are better defined in advance and have options for their behavior. The simplest example of risk is a hard time with a team of repairmen or the loss of a wallet during a holiday abroad.

An action program — what is usually called a plan — is an ordered list of activities needed to achieve a goal. It is assumed that if you do as it will be written, then everything will definitely work out. In fact, it is not necessary - the program should not just be, it should be objective and multivariate, since nobody canceled the risks and limited resources. For this we need to spend ...

Analysis of the area in which we will act, highlighting all of the above. Then create a program so that each next step logically flows from the previous one. In particular, so that at every step we have enough resources to implement the next one.

A useful step in the analysis is the creation of a model of changes in the amount of resources during the execution of the plan. In a business plan, at a minimum, the financial model should be described - the calculation of the amount of funds on the balance sheet in each month of the plan’s execution.

It is useful to make several plans for different conditions. Usually they are made by three: optimistic, realistic, pessimistic.

Why do you need a plan

The main task of the plan is to demonstrate that its goal is at least theoretically achievable. It is especially important to keep this in mind for start-ups - no less great mathematics often gets in the way of a great idea and it turns out that even a super-optimistic plan gives losses for the first 100 years.

The plan outlines the boundaries of reality in which goal achievement is possible, thereby reducing the search for solutions.

His second task - to save our energy and time - once thought out and recorded it is not necessary to think it over and write it down again. At least not so often. Without a plan, after completing the next task, you will again and again engage in planning and rescheduling instead of going straight to the next stage. Having a clear road map to the goal, we will not leave it and waste resources on solving problems that suddenly seemed important to us.

Therefore, even a thin plan is better than his absence.

Plan is not needed - we have too much uncertainty

This statement is found most often and it is difficult at first to argue with his promise. When you start a new business, you most likely do not have almost any reliable information. But is it any?

Immediately we will reject the cases of professional discoverers of restaurants and riveters of business card websites - they have some clear plans - 100500 cafes have already been opened and 100500 websites have been made. We are interested in situations where there really is no experience.

Instead of experience, we have knowledge (and the ability to google).

We can define the goal and the criteria for achieving it. And “creating a new unique product” is a goal for itself, since its criteria are vague. But “creating a product with a net profit of $ 500 / month in 6 months and $ 10,000 / month in a year” is much better.

Even if you have no experience to define realistic criteria, there is always information to determine their pessimistic option. Just ask yourself: “when do I refuse to achieve the goal?” In our example, this is an income of less than $ 500 / month after six months of work. And in what conditions you will be ready to continue to go to the goal without a load of doubts for the soul?

We can determine the resources that are originally. In the worst case, there will be no other resources. What can be achieved, relying only on them?

Most of the risks can be identified using simple logic and a wide outlook. Their usual sources are: state, people, nature, the unknown. Think: what kind of disgusting you can expect from each of them?

These considerations are enough to analyze and develop even two plans: pessimistic and satisfactory. Useful help will be the stories of people who have already done the same (or part of the same) - from them you can get the upper and lower estimates of many parameters. If there are none at all, then you are definitely doing something dumb.

The plan is not needed - and so everything is clear

The second extreme, is less common, but it also happens. It is characteristic for people who do not have experience in solving complex tasks. For example, for schoolchildren with gamedev.ru, when they start developing their first game.

How is it guaranteed to explain to a person that far from everything is clear, even when it seems so, I do not know. It all depends on the person’s experience: he accepts the fact that everyone is mistaken (including him) or not.

Practice validation works much better. If everything is already clear, then documenting clarity on paper will take a maximum of a day. And certainly this attempt will fail, which will be the best evidence in favor of planning.

Conclusion

Do not be lazy and do not be afraid to do planning. It is not as difficult as it seems at first glance.

It would be nice to practice on a couple of your ideas, even not very good ones. When needed, a stuffed hand will make work much easier.