Whether you are the Boss, a Director or Manager you need to be writing a business plan that identifies what you are going to do, when, who will do it and how you will know if it’s working. The skill of writing a business plan.

Your team members need to know where their efforts ‘fit’ into the plan as their ability to achieve their targets will define your and their success or failure.

A good start point is to debate and agree what you are trying to achieve overall (ie. Why everyone is working so hard), this could be your ambition, sometimes called the vision. You should be able to articulate your vision in a statement that makes sense to you, to colleagues and potentially clients or suppliers if you choose to make it public.

It is a statement of intent that identifies what you want to achieve and importantly, by when. If you don’t have a series of dates as stepping stones, you won’t be able to monitor if you are on track. If you only check back in 12 months’ time you might be so far off target that you cannot get back.

The next stage can be to develop a commercial plan. The completion of activities that you identify in your plan should move you towards achieving your vision. Sometimes staff can be putting in great effort but if your people aren’t aligned towards interlocking goals then all that effort and goodwill could be going to waste. Start writing a business plan for effective results.