Tools

Templates, Outlines and Models are some of the ressources we've found

useful with our clients. Grab them and work with them on your own, or email

us with any comments, feedback or questions. We hope they serve as staters

for both thought and action.

• Business plan outlines

Few topics inspire such dread as business plan. The sound like such work to

assemble. They are however very important : They serve to demonstrate to

others your sincerety and commitment -both to doing the hard work and to

thinking your business through. A few hours' work tackling the fundamental

challenges of defining an early marketing budget and slogging through

appropriate media choices will serve you as well as considering early on

when and how you will outsource / offshore.

You can anticipate gotchas while you synchronize yourself up with realities of

what the next year will require. Be forgiving, make guesses when you must,

fill in all the blanks possible while trying to come up with answers that generate

math that will, at the very least, roughly add up. The plan should be no more

than 16 pages, and is something you should plan to revisit about 3 months.

• Activity planning

From your business plan, you have the necessary material to begin building an

aggregate view of your business. Now that you know where you want to go,

you can lay out a plan for how to get there. Your business plan serves as a

framework to identify what you need to be successful. It necessarily throws light

upon gaps in your current business -positions not yet filled, data not yet gathered,

and operational details not yet resolved. Not knowing the answers to these

questions is perfectly fine, especially in the beginning. What is important is to get

clear about what you don't know, and then plan for getting the information you

need. Activity planning comes to the rescue at this point because it serves as a way

to orchestrate work in the face of ambiguity, rapid change, and a high degree of

task interdependence. The format we embrace lends itself well creating both a high

level management understanding and mechanism to keep track details.

These tools are helpful for

- Mapping your business activities

- Coordinating activities among your team.