Planning for the rainy day!

Planning for the rainy day!

Over the past couple of months I have been speaking to a number of prospective clients, all of whom have good businesses. So why, you may think, are they talking to me, the simple answer is they, like many other businesses, want to smooth out their sales curve to ensure they have regular income throughout the year. One point to make is these are not small businesses, most of them are turning over in excess of £5m a year, yet still they suffer from this age old business problem.

So how do you solve it?

From my perspective there is no real alternative to good planning and strategy. This does not mean last minute planning of campaigns, it means looking and your business in the longer term and understanding what is going to enable you to differentiate from your competitors, there will be plenty of them. With this planning in place a business will be able to raise it’s profile with prospects.

However, in my experience, organisations of all shapes and size always find a reason why they don’t plan. From my days working in multi-national corporates, where annual planning was a last minute panic and typically ended up moving into the following year. To smaller businesses and organisations who will always say “we’re too busy to plan, we might look at it in a few months”.

Then comes the crunch, in a few months an email pops up “can we talk, we have hit a bit of a flat period and need to generate some more business”.

I sometimes feel like a broken record, I can’t remember how many times I’ve had this conversation, yet those companies who do plan well will achieve their potential. Those that don’t, whilst they may generate revenue, will always be subject to peaks and troughs and in the long term, will not build a completely stable business.

I am interested in what other views on this are, let me know.

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