Maintaining your Business Plan

The purpose of maintaining your plan is to use business results to guide your future decisions. The plan itself has no value if it does not help you improve business. That&undefined;s regardless of how good or bad, how brilliant the ideas, writing, or how elaborate the tables and charts. Its value is the decisions it leads to.

That means, of course, that to make a plan worth the effort of developing it, you&undefined;ll want to follow it up. Whether that&undefined;s every month or every quarter, you need to track results, analyze the difference between plan and actual results, and manage. Change things that need to be changed. Compare what you planned to what happened in reality. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What went wrong, and how can we fix it?
• What went right, and how can we take advantage of it?
• What changes took place in the competitive landscape that could be updated in the plan?
• What changes took place affecting our market that could be updated in the plan?
• What changes took place internally in our organization that could be updated in the plan?

After you have answered these questions, update your plan accordingly, set new budgets and milestones, adjust your financials, and repeat the process with another review of your plan again next month or next quarter. Update your plan accordingly again, and keep repeating. You&undefined;ll find that maintaining your business plan gives you a better grasp on your business, your market, and everything else that happens with your company.