Why Plan Your Way To Success?
We have worked with over 800 hospitality businesses in Victoria over the past 20 years and in our experience we’ve found creating a plan following these 5 steps to be the most effective way to achieve your business goals.
There are 5 steps that will help you plan your way to success.
Success can mean a lot of different things to different people. It’s important to define your version of success. Both in terms of your business and your life outside business. As mostly owner operators the two are not mutually exclusive. This will help you identify relevant goals.
Measurable (how will you know when you achieve it?
Step 1 Exercise – Define 3 SMART business goals.
Now we have our destination, but still no map. To reach our ultimate goal, we need to break it down into smaller steps – strategies and tactics.
If a goal is what you want to achieve, a strategy is how you will achieve it and tactics are the specific actions you will take.
Step 2 Exercise – outline strategies and tactics to meet your 3 business goals as identified in the last activity.
Now we are halfway there. We’ve completed your ‘Business Plan’ – so we have our map, our destination, and our route. But what about our starting point?
You are probably familiar with a SWOT Analysis – it is a business tool used to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. While the strengths and weaknesses are generally internal to the business, opportunities and threats are generally external.
It applies to any and all business resources – human, physical, financial, process, or experience.
Identifying your strengths and weaknesses can help you identify the current capacity of your business to achieve your goals.
Looking at your strengths will help to identify opportunities to exploit, and looking at your weaknesses will help to identify anything that may prevent you achieving your goals. Essentially it will show where you are currently at – or your starting point.
Step 3 Exercise – list 5 current strengths of your business and 5 current weaknesses.
So now we have our starting point, but who is going to drive us there?
While navigating the map (in this case, your ‘Business Plan’) is the job of you – the business leader, the whole team is needed to drive the plan.
Implementing and actioning the strategies and actions you have come up with requires people! (amongst other resources).
So we need to ensure you have the right human resources. Your team (no matter how big it is) is the most important part of implementing your plan and this section will show you how you can use what you’ve already got to achieve your goals.
Often a mix is required to fully learn a skill, and it can be useful to incorporate training in this order – start with explaining, then demonstrating, then get the learner to perform a task and later check they can do it by themselves.
Step 5 Exercise – consider each team member. Note down their skills gaps and identify any relevant training opportunities. This is your Development Plan.
I’ve guided you through a very simplified version of our Workforce Development Program, which you can find out more about here. If you need any advice or assistance in planning team development or would like to discuss how the Workforce Development Program might suit your business, get in touch.