Business Planning: Strategy

I often suggest building a plan like an artichoke, with its heart in the center and the rest of the plan wrapping up and around it. I also suggests starting anywhere you like, which is a bit of a contradiction, or perhaps just another paradox. You can start anywhere you like, but build your plan around the heart, which implies that the heart comes first. And usually it does.

The heart of the plan, which is also the heart of the business, is made up of a group of three core concepts that can’t be separated: market, identity, and focus. Don’t pull them apart. It’s the interrelationship between them that drives your business.

So let’s look at what I call the heart of the plan-as-you-go business plan, the core strategy, which is this enmeshed combination of the business identity, the target market element, and the strategic focus. I’m going to go through each of these in more detail in the rest of this section, but let’s first establish that they are completely interrelated, and that you never separate any one of them from the other two.

About the Author

Founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software and bplans.com, on twitter as Timberry, doing social media business planning at smbplans.com, and blogging at timberry.bplans.com. Stanford MBA. Married 42 years, father of 5. Author of business plan software Business Plan Pro and www.liveplan.com and books including The Plan As You Go Business Plan, published by Entrepreneur Press, 2008.