Business Planning For 2019

Looking into this new year, you need to set off on the right foot and ensure your planning is on point.

Now before you start planning for 2019, the first thing you should do is reflect and look at 2018.

Look at what your targets were and if you hit them or not. If you fell short, was it by a lot? And if you exceeded them, which ones did you exceed?

You should also be looking at what was accomplished, what didn’t go as planned and what lessons you learnt.

This helps you understand and build a platform where you can start from in 2019. You have a better idea of what’s reasonable.

After this you need to figure out what you want to achieve in 2019, is it growth, sales, increased market share, increased profits, larger product line? You, as a business owner, will need to figure this out.

Remember, these goals need to be SMART, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

Next, you want to complete a SWOT analysis and look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

This is a great way of helping you uncover opportunities you can exploit and weaknesses you can try and eliminate. We would suggest you do more than one of these, one for your overall business and one for each of your goals. It’s a simple analysis that can have a huge impact when it comes to planning.

You can find out more about how to complete an in-depth SWOT analysis in our Map destination.

Once you’ve completed these steps, it’s time to start planning your 2019 Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.

The key to setting KPIs is to look at both your long and short-term targets and break them down into actionable KPIs. These KPIs will be how you know if you’ve achieved your goals you set at the end of the year. For example, if your goal is to increase overall profit margin by 5% then your KPI is the 5% profit margin, if you achieve a 4% increase in profit margin then you haven’t hit your goal and if it’s 6% then you have. Quite simple once you break it down.

Finally, you need to look at your long-term 3-year and 5-year plans, does this 1-year plan fit in with these? How does it help you achieve these long-term goals?

Once you have these goals, how you’re going to measure them and how they fit into your long-term plan you can start to plan the strategic and tactical side of things that will allow you to figure out how you’re going to achieve these goals. Are you going to invest more in marketing? If so, where are you going to invest? Facebook Ads? Organic social media? Influencer marketing?