You might need a business plan to be presented in a particular way for an external audience (e.g. your bank), but a plan for use within your business needs only to be presented in a way that makes sense to you. Spending time making a plan look beautiful will not add to the quality when it is only you and your team who will use it.

The most important part of the exercise is to identify what it is that you are going to do and then commit this to paper. Goals will remain dreams if you don’t write them down. The process of reviewing, planning and decision making in preparation for this is also important as it helps you think things through. And if you don’t know what you are aiming for, then your team certainly won’t, and you will find it difficult to know whether you are a success or not.

There are three key steps to effective business planning. The associated questions you need to ask are:

• Where are we now?
• What is changing?
• Where are we going and what do we want to achieve?