PSMJ’s consulting expert, Dave Burstein, PE, presents Why Most Business Plans Are a Total Waste of Time – and How to Do a Really Good Plan in Just 4 Hours in this 2011 webinar recording.  

Part I: Why Most Business Plans Are a Total Waste of Time

Here is a true story about the experience of a subsidiary president from a major A/E firm.  Every year, when it came time to do their annual business plan, his firm employed the following process:

1. Department Managers prepared annual budgets for their departments and sent them to their Office Managers
2. Office Managers reviewed and modified, then sent annual budgets to their Regional Managers
3. Regional Managers reviewed and modified, then sent annual budgets to their Subsidiary Presidents
4. Subsidiary Presidents reviewed and modified, then sent annual budgets to the CEO
5. CEO rejected the budgets and handed down targets he thought were appropriate
6. The new targets were then filtered down to the regions, offices and departments

The subsidiary president calculated that this process cost $320,000 of overhead labor and suggested to the CEO that the firm save the time and effort by having the CEO just give each subsidiary the target he thought was appropriate.  This would save more than half the costs of doing their annual business plans.  The CEO replied, “Then you folks wouldn’t be bought into the targets.”

This story is a bit extreme (although completely true).  But the managers at most large A/E firms express these frustration about their annual business planning process:

• Too time consuming
• Goals are unrealistic
• Too much focus on the numbers; not enough focus on the actions that produce the numbers
• Forecasts rarely correlate with reality

The opposite problem is faced by smaller firms that don’t do annual business planning at all.  They have no strategic direction and are forced to deal with each opportunity or problem on a one-off basis.

Part II: How to Do a Really Good Business Plan in Just 4 Hours

PSMJ has developed a series of Excel templates that will produce a perfectly adequate annual business plan for firms of under 50 employees.  At this webinar, we’ll share these templates with you and show you how to use them.  For larger firms, we’ll give you an approach that allows you to establish a sound annual business plan without a lot of wasted effort.

The webinar recording is available for viewing for only $249 (newsletter members can purchase the recording for only $149). Call PSMJ's Education Department at (800) 537-7765 or (617) 965-0055 for more information.

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