Your business plan should cover a period of time sufficient to see the trends for your industry and your own business performance. This is called backPlanning because you put a stake in the ground and work backward. Most businesses tend to plan for three to five years. While that is better than one to three years, the time should be more in the ten- to fifteen-year zones for strategic planning. A solid recommended time frame is ten years. Longer backPlanning time frames are better for several reasons:
- A ten-year period gives you more start points to put critical actions in place. There may be many things you would like to do but cannot start them all next year. A wide time span lets you spread the start points over a number of years and make reasonable commitments.
- A ten-year span gives you time to ramp up if necessary. You may need to continue business as usual for several years until you build momentum.
- A ten-year time frame makes your story more believable.
Employees can see a series of progressive actions to accomplish heroic deeds more easily than attempting to create overnight successes. The latter is not believable.
- A ten-year time frame allows you to build early successes.
Trying to compress a huge success into a three- to five-year span often leads to failure. You must guarantee a series of incremental successes starting small and growing.
Consider the phrase “back planning and forward execution.” BackPlanning is a concept of starting at some future point in time to establish a vision and goals, then working backward to confirm the mission. Execution is then a forward activity from the base of the mission.
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backplanningFiled under: Business
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