Tool Box
Issue No. 8 - December/ 2002/january
Start with a Coat Hanger
Your business plan on a coat hanger
by Reg Templer
Have you ever seen a business that’s going in all the wrong directions and wondered why?
You know the sort of thing — business that’s almost at odds with itself, begging to go in a certain direction but the powers that be just won’t let it take the journey. Often the products are wrong and the markets they are selling to have changed dramatically and the business hasn’t kept up. Eventually, new management takes over and zoom, off it goes.
This often happens because when the business plan was written, a vital element was missed right at the beginning of the process that failed to correctly show direction. In short, the managers either didn’t create a ‘coat hanger’ to hang the plan on, or got it wrong and created a grand (unrealistic) vision statement that wasn’t achievable but looked great when framed on a wall in the reception lobby of a business.
Coat hanger? What has a coat hanger got to do with business plans, where we speak of visions and directions and other grandiose things? In fact, the coat hanger concept is vital to the direction that your business takes and makes your business plan easier to relate to.
Here’s how it works.
Step 1 is to articulate the coat hanger — the core idea that the rest of your business plan evolves from. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to be understandable and it should include your ideals, your directions and goals, simplified into a couple of short, well-worded paragraphs.
As you go on to build the strategies and objectives below, ask yourself if these elements ‘fit’ your coat hanger. If they don’t, scrap them, because you need to control the directions your business goes in.
Anyone can write a great business plan if they know where to start, do it one step at a time, write it in ‘plain-speak’, allow about four weeks to do the work and do some basic research first.
...
