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O P I N I O N
Roll with it! Your firm might want to try rolling business plans with one-, three-, and 20-year projections. It’s a lot of work, but it beats starting over again and again.
I t is generally good business to create a business plan. More importantly, business plans should never be too far from reach. Back in the day, Westwood put a lot of energy into creating three-year strategic and annual plans, only to set them on a shelf and revisit them when their timeframe expired. As a result, we were less accountable to our efforts and weren’t making the much needed adjustments to strategies along the way. The true value of the plan was never realized.
Paul Greenhagen FIRM FOUNDATION
planning is more frequently taking moments to stop and evaluate the current market conditions and make adjustments. And, though three-year strategic planning getaways can be great for strategizing and teaming, they likely won’t deliver the best return for the cost if it is the only time business planning happens – and the getaways include only the executive team. “The rolling business planning process creates efficiencies by no longer having to recreate the wheel every year or so.”
Rolling business plans aim to fix all of that. They require routine reexamination to tweak forecasts and tactics throughout the plan’s lifecycle. The rolling business planning process creates efficiencies by no longer having to recreate the wheel every year or so. Our process starts by creating a 20-year vision plan which is then reviewed and refreshed every three years. From the vision plan, we create three- year strategic plans and update them annually. We also create one-year business plans which we update quarterly. Though it requires a lot of effort, this process greatly reduces the amount of work needed long term to create or adjust each plan. Plans stay fresh and dynamic versus static and stale. Rather than splurging on a big offsite strategic retreat every three years, rolling business
See PAUL GREENHAGEN, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER October 17, 2016, ISSUE 1172
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