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Have you considered the benefits of annual business planning? Does your annual business process meet your needs?

An annual business plan —updated regularly — is your road map for deciding your company’s short-term direction and focus. While the traditional strategic business plan identifies the long-range strategy for your company, the annual plan helps you define and build consensus among key leadership around operational goals and objectives for the year.

The process of developing an annual plan — particularly the strategic and risk elements — allows you to respond more quickly to external conditions that change throughout the year and to plan proactively for the long-term. An annual business plan is also a crucial element to building trust with your key stakeholders, including lenders or investors, who often prefer to work with organizations that have a well-thought-out plan for achieving their business goals.

But annual planning requires a commitment of time and resources and involves examining potentially uncomfortable issues. It presents a challenge for any business.

How we can help
The experienced professionals at RSM McGladrey help you define the actions you should take to achieve your objectives. Our methodology for developing an annual business plan is designed to:

• Analyze opportunities and mitigate threats
• Establish priorities
• Improve management consensus
• Address critical operational issues
• Allocate financial resources
• Measure and evaluate strategic progress

This approach to annual business planning includes the following key steps:

• Business situation analysis that documents organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• A review of the current mission to either reaffirm or refine the company’s basic purpose
• A statement of corporate or organization-wide annual goals
• Key departmental annual goals, including strategic action steps
• An annual profit plan or budget

Why RSM McGladrey
We go beyond helping you develop the annual business plan — we work with you to implement, measure and evaluate your strategic progress. To keep you on track and help you drive accountability, we can design and facilitate monthly or quarterly review meetings for your annual business plan.

Our business planning consultants are experienced in working with growing companies to facilitate annual planning processes. And our organization is structured to align with key industries. This means we understand how your organization is staffed and can anticipate the issues you’ll face.