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It's Important!
The February 2007 Harvard Business Review contains an article entitled, "How managers' everyday decisions create - or destroy - your company's strategy".
This thought is at the heart of the
Our focus is on "hard skills". These are the skills associated with managing the business as opposed to managing people - though we recognise that the two are inextricably intertwined - in fact, the need to take an holistic perspective is one of the recurring themes of our courses.
HappyAtom works with organisations in a number of ways. Our Services page provides more detail. Briefly, we provide training - development of materials, train-the-trainer, delivery - and consulting services.
Business Planning Training
From business planning training through to our effective executive courses, HappyAtom offers a unique approach to gaining sustainable competitive advantage. Click to view an outline of one of our business planning courses.
Effective business planning requires knowledge and skills in 3 key areas:
- strategy
- marketing
- finance
Strategy
Anyone involved in writing business plans must have strategic awareness. Strategy is the path by which an organisation creates sustainable competitive advantage. It is long-term and is concerned with the type of decisions that require substantial investment of time, resources and capital; decisions that will have an impact far into the future.
Strategy is about focus - what will you do and what will you not do with regard to:
- markets
- products
- customer and supplier relationships
- skills ... etc
However, strategy can never be described in all-encompassing detail. There are many tactical decisions that can only be made closer to the ground and there are judgement calls. HappyAtom business planning training gives managers strategic understanding so that the business plans that they create will be consistent with the overall strategy. Follow this link for more information about our approach to strategy development.
Marketing
Marketing is at the core of our business planning training programmes. The importance of marketing is captured by these words of Peter Drucker:
"Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'. ... Concern and responsibility for marketing must permeate all areas of the enterprise."
By marketing we mean, the marketing concept; in other words, organising the business in such a way that everyone in the organisation is focused on the customer. Follow this link for more information about our marketing training in the context of business planning.
Finance
Too many programmes focus on the narrow aspects of finance - profit and loss, balance sheet and cashflow. Effective business plans require more than conventional finance skills. First we have to ensure that the plan will actually increase the value of the firm. This does not simply mean, "Will we generate a profit this year"; many profitable firms are actually declining in value. "Value" looks beyond the traditional financial statements, P&L and Balance Sheet, and considers the assets that do not appear on either of these and yet are the most important assets in the business - the intangibles:
- brand
- customer and supplier relationships
- skills, knowledge, experience and attitudes
- etc
The financial aspects of the business plan must incorporate these elements - otherwise the firm becomes trapped in short-term-ism, shying away from the required investments to gain long-term sustainable competitive advantage. HappyAtom has considerable expertise in this area - visit our finance pages for more information. We can even provide training or consultancy to help build Excel models to support your Business Planning activities.
Please use the menu at the top of the page to find out more about our expertise and services.
