My evil plan ??

Before Just Bee, I worked in 'Business Recovery'. This was fancy finance talk for helping businesses that were about to die. They were usually on their last legs because they were running out of cash. We would go in as advisors and try to work out what could be done to change the company's destiny. Cut costs? Enter a new market? Sell assets? Reduce working capital? etc etc. The common theme with these businesses was that they had missed their businesses plans (by a country marathon). I spent over a year at one client who was in the middle of a restructure. It was my job to help achieve a set of cost cutting initiatives and the business plan was seen as an important tool in the process. Planning took the best part of 6 weeks; it was led by the Finance team (which I was part of) and required getting various departments and stakeholders in the business to agree and sign off. Like most big corporates, each department had thousands of staff, its own leader and sometimes a very different culture to the other departments. Given budgets were being chopped, there was often friction and conflicting motivations. Getting the plan signed off took a lot of time, effort and money! At the end of Q1, you’d check where each team was up to with their part of the plan: the reality was often very different to what had been agreed just months before. Because of this, there was extensive re-forecasting as early as April. Really?!

Since starting Just Bee, we have built various business plans and one thing that rings true with my corporate days – not one of them has come true! But for a completely different reason. It's nothing to do with conflicting motivations and cultures or lack of buy-in from the management team, in a start up, in the early days, your plans don’t come true because they are built on dreams and bad assumptions. Small businesses are often innovating and forging a new path, so you don’t know what you don’t know and a lot of guess work is involved when doing your business plan. At the end of Q1, you look at the P&L and it is wildly different to what you planned (usually worse) and operationally you have gone off and explored a load of new ‘opportunities’ that were never on the agreed plan. At least, that’s how it always used to pan out for us!

In 2020, the plan was torn up on 25 March (remember what happened that day?). In June 2020, we launched Vitamin Honey and by the end of 2020 the business was growing so quickly that we didn’t really have time to do a plan for 2021 and we also just thought f*ck it – what’s the point in a plan when the business is automatically doing what we want it to do? Let the business lead us for once. Towards the end of 2021, it wasn’t like trying to cling on to a bucking bronco anymore, so we sat down and took stock (I hate that phrase). We designed a vision for the future of Just Bee. A 2022 Plan was written with the strategies, people and funding we would need to make it all happen.

We are three-and-a-bit months into that plan. So: Is it as useful as yesterday’s chip paper or has it led us to the treasure? Well, I’m pleased to announce that for the first time EVER a business plan actually appears to be working. What has changed? First, we have a much better product with a high repeat purchase rate – this is massively helpful for planning and stability. We also have a lot more data to base our planning on – being a D2C brand (vs. through retail) allows you to segment your revenue and marketing in a million different ways. Finally, we have better governance - we have split the plan into quarterly strategies and tactics and have a weekly meeting which checks everyone is still working towards them. If one of us wants to go off an explore a new ‘opportunity’, we need to convince the others it’s worth compromising focus on one of the initially planned things. Don’t get me wrong, things still go wrong and we don’t land everything we hoped to, but for the first time ever – going into Q2, it feels like we are in control.

13 years into my career, I had become disillusioned by business plans, convinced that they were an evil waste of time... save for raising new funding or getting new stakeholder buy in. But perhaps (just perhaps) this year I'm about to see the light and realise they are actually useful to influence positive change within a business.

I would love to know what your views are on business plans? Are they useful? Does their success depend on the size or the age/maturity of the business? Are plans only meant to be directional as opposed to be precision tools? Or do you run your business in another way without a written plan at all? ??