You seriously believe that I should tear up the Business Plan?
Many businesses have a very detailed budget plan that they tackle annually and spend months doing and re-calibrating their numbers in the process.
Others only do a business plan once every three years and live with the initial numbers for the whole of that period.
Against this background, Eric Ottaway believes that one should…
TEAR UP THE BUSINESS PLAN!
He is the CEO of Brooklyn Brewery based in New York, which he joined in the 1990’s. It exports its product all over the world.
He feels that he has sound business leadership advice to those starting out (and that he wished he had someone give him this advice many years earlier in his own career).
On joining this business, he believed that his first business plan was going to lead him and the company to an IPO within 10 years.
Six months later he tore up his business plan!
He states that the pandemic has again illustrated that the advice he now gives business leaders to do the same, is sound. In his opinion he believes that what one needs to rather do is
- to be nimble on their feet,
- think quickly
- adjust their business plan and strategy on the fly.
That is his secret to his success.
We also believe that you need to be flexible in all of your business processes and it applies to the budgets and forecasts too.
Your legacy financial systems could tie you down to the last century approach on budgets still followed by many businesses.
That’s why we do it differently!
We have the tools to achieve exactly those three elements stated by Eric and we practice it all the time with our clients. Flexibility and having the tools to evaluate and re evaluate your processes is what our M4RI planing system is all about.
What do believe you should be doing to improve the processes and results from your plan?