‘You’ve developed your big idea, now it’s time to write your business plan’

David Kirk is a former Rhodes scholar, All Black and Rugby World Cup winning captain and currently the co-founder and managing partner of Bailador, an ASX-listed investment fund. In addition, he is the chair of both the NZ Food Network and KiwiHarvest.

OPINION: In previous articles in this series we’ve discussed all the steps business founders need to take to turn their ‘big idea’ into a reality. These were:

●     Stress test your idea

●     Stress test yourself

●     Figure out what to measure

●     Determine that your business has pretty good efficiency and scalability

Chances are, when you have done all of that you will just get on and start doing stuff. Like Deborah Manning, founder of food rescue not-for-profit KiwiHarvest and NZFN.

She just got on with driving around in her car, walking into shops asking for excess food and delivering it to organisations that served hungry people.

But before long, especially if things are going well, you are going to need a plan. The plan will start in your head, which is fine. Your first plan is simply all the ways you are solving the problems that arise as you do what you are doing.

If you want to stay in a one-woman band, then the plan can probably stay in your head. But if you want to grow your business and have other people join you to do more good over time, you will have to get the plan written down.

This is for two reasons: one, people forget stuff if it isn’t written down; and two, you need to be ahead of the game, you need to be doing things now that will avoid or solve problems that will otherwise bite you in the future.

Start with a vision and a purpose. Your vision is an aspirational, action-oriented, big-picture sentence capturing what success will look like. Your purpose is what you have founded your business to do. It is practical and clear on what outcomes you will achieve on the way to your vision.

The rest of the plan is about what you need to do to achieve your purpose and move you closer to your vision, starting with your company’s strategic priorities. These are the three or four big things that really matter for success. For KiwiHarvest and NZFN these are things like:

●     Build a wide base of food donors

●     Identify the most appropriate food recipients

●     Set up transport and storage infrastructure and systems

●     Hire and train the people needed to run the business

Each strategic priority is then broken down into the activities required to make it happen – the operational priorities. For instance, for the first strategic priority, to build a wide base of food donors,- the activities will be:

●     Build the case for why potential donors should donate

●     Research and build a list of potential donors

●     Identify who to speak to at each potential donor

●     Meet and present your case for donation

●     Chase them up if you don’t hear back from them in a week

For each operational priority there needs to be a description of what success looks like, who will do it and by when.

One useful way to think about the difference between strategic and operational priorities is that strategic priorities are what the whole organisation needs to achieve in the long term, and operational priorities are what someone in the organisation needs to achieve in the short term.

Once you have filled out all the operational priorities for each strategic priority, you will have a good idea how many people you will need to help you, how much it will cost to run the business and how much good you can do with the resources you can muster. The plan will develop and change over time, but the strategic priorities should stay pretty much the same unless there is a big change in the operating environment.

The next step is to add a budget to your plan.