Lean business planning: Effective method of business plan writing

Whether you are a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned one, you always need a business plan. Right from ideation, strategy, market launch to figuring out the numbers on the go, all of it needs to be managed. Lean business planning helps to collate your inputs for them in one place. Mostly, lean business planning is for internal team alignment. Yet, the clarity gained from it also helps for external outreach.

In line with its name, lean business planning simply means a no-frills attached approach to chart out your business. Typically, a lean business plan is a set of tables, charts, checklists that summarises your business.

Businesses are prone to rapid change, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Lean business planning helps every founder to efficiently navigate it. Keeping up with the same, you could monthly or quarterly review your lean business plan, that way, it would stay relevant and agile.

Understanding lean business planning

Being true to its name, a lean business plan is quintessentially minimal and to the point. It has no frills attached. Lean business planning ensures that you constantly improve in steps by following a breakdown of plans, actions, impacts and recalibrate it to achieve new goals for your business. That’s why it is one of the smartest methods to put to practice to align the next phase of growth for your business. There is a misconception that lean business planning just trims all the “fluff” and is only recommended for solopreneurs or bootstrapped businesses. Lean business planning, when done right, could potentially help companies across various scales. It typically follows the PDCA process: plan, do, check, and act.

When you initiate lean business planning, you would take a detailed look at the strategy, plan of action, substantial data, and numbers/predictions. Let’s understand the significance of these parameters:

Strategy:

Every business has a set of problems that need to be addressed — by it internally or externally. Strategic thinking helps you in finding the relevant market for your business, your potential customers, and your offerings. All of this is done using a checklist or templates that simplify a series of business challenges.

Plan of Action:

While you might have wholly strategized, until and unless you do not execute, lean business planning is useless. However, by following it without a miss, you could align your business for accelerated growth. Right from marketing, sales till managing budgets, raising capital, and even recruitment is addressed through the execution of the lean business plan

Substantial Data:

You could go through a checklist of tasks, deliverables, performance indicators, future expectations from the business, milestones, achievements with the help of a lean business canvas.

Numbers and Predictions:

This lays out a clear picture for you to measure your total budget, expenditure. You can also gauge cash flow projections and forecast sales with the help of lean business planning.

A lean business template is created to meet the requirements of every industry and they are designed to streamline your business. That way, with the help of lean business planning, you can move to clarity from chaos.

Why Lean Business Planning is Smart?

Although as a founder, you would do consistent reviews, checks, putting a lean business plan to use helps the management to navigate the way ahead. A lean business plan serves as a brilliant draft and covers all the significant details about your business.

There are many key sections for writing a great business plan. By considering lean business planning, you would address all of them in one go. A lean business plan organically acknowledges priorities, essential metrics and even covers accountability. If you are looking for a smart way to devise a viable strategy then lean business planning is a simple, precise, and seamless method to drive your business ahead.

Lean business planning is preferred by entrepreneurs and startups for these key reasons:

It is quick: Unlike the traditional, convoluted presentations, a lean business plan is fast to create. Lean business planning not only cuts all the trivial challenges out but also saves you a lot of time that gets wasted doing analysis paralysis.

It is up to the minute: Updating a lean business plan is not at all difficult. If you know your customers, vision for your venture, your teams in and out then you can revise it within hours leave alone days.

It is precise: A lean business plan template helps you in tapping the business fundamentals. It requires only basic information, ideas to reach the essence of your business.

More importantly, a lean business summarizes your venture with relatively less effort, time and hence proves to be a smart way to put it to use. Conventionally, you need a document, playbook of 30–50 pages to showcase your business to investors, teams, and customers. A lean business plan boils all of them down to one or three pages.

The lean business plan also motivates the founding teams to think in a clear way. There is no way to hide or cover up anything on the lean canvas. That way, your business would never lose touch with the market reality. So, small business owners, startups can leverage its minimalism and keep driving growth. Through collaboration, contemplation, and communication, lean business planning helps founders in being rather lean even during global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a nutshell, writing a lean business plan is one of the smartest ways to create a solid foundation for your business. Lean business planning helps in creating synergy between the founders, internal teams, clients and it gives distinct clarity to all the stakeholders.