The BackPocket! Business Plan: Outrageously Simple Business Planning for Extraordinary Business Results

By John D. Doehring

Success with business planning has never been easy, and it’s ever more challenging today in the constantly uncertain, shape-shifting, uber-noisy, and superfast business world. The prospects for capturing success are extraordinary, but so are the risks, and leaders must themselves modify how they run the firm and plan for its future. Frankly, way too many organizations, teams, and individuals do business planning all wrong - wasting their time and energy on misguided efforts that don't matter. Business planning should focus not on the plan, but on the business! We need a business planning process better equipped for 21st century success. We need The BackPocket! Business Plan.

Created by noted business author, speaker, and certified management consultant John Doehring, the BackPocket! Business Plan offers a fresh, relevant, and maverick approach - and a radical departure from the ho-hum, boring, and often useless, business-as-usual approach of most firms. The BackPocket! Business Plan is outrageously simple and short (just three pages in total) and it fits into a leader’s pocket (where it can actually be used to guide important business decisions in real time).

In The BackPocket! Business Plan John Doehring shares what’s generally wrong with business and strategic planning today, why standard business plans most often don’t work, and how managers and leaders can and must change their planning approach for real organization success. John outlines the The BackPocket! Business Plan methodology, and describes each of the component parts involved in creating a simple, straightforward, and effective business plan. The BackPocket! Business Plan even contains a formatted template that readers can use to jump start their own new or updated business plan.
Also included are a dozen short, case-story vignettes - each based on a true client situation from the author’s background - to provide additional insights into business planning, and to assist readers in achieving their own growth, profit, and sustainable organization success.

The BackPocket! Business Plan is a short read, but it’s packed with ideas and insights for productive business planning. Running a successful firm is rarely easy, and it’s becoming harder all the time. A lengthy, complex, unclear, and confusing business plan won’t help, and neither will having no business plan at all. Order the BackPocket! Business Plan today and begin your journey to a better business plan -and to extraordinary business results!

John Doehring is The Maverick Advisor! and an accomplished speaker, author, educator, and certified management consultant. Founder and principal of J. Doehring & Co., John helps organizations to improve and grow through better business planning, sales and marketing performance, and operations excellence. Clients include professional services firms, entrepreneurs, and companies ranging from large to small, broadly-diversified to niche-specialists, around-the-block to around-the-world. J. Doehring & Co.’s mission is to help clients plan for the future, grow their business, and make more money!
John Doehring’s forthcoming book is entitled Fast Future! The Ten Uber-Trends Changing Everything in Business and Our World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John D. Doehring
• Release date: Aug 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311716637

John D. Doehring

John D. Doehring is The Maverick Advisor!, and an accomplished speaker, author, educator, and (certified) management consultant. Founder and principal of J. Doehring & Co., John helps organizations plan for the future, grow their business, and make more money. Clients are primarily professional services firms and other middle market companies, and range from large to small, broadly-diversified to niche-specialist, around-the-block to around-the-world. J. Doehring & Co.’s mission is to help clients achieve extraordinary results with growth, profit, and sustainable success!

Book preview

The BackPocket! Business Plan

Outrageously Simple Business Planning for Extraordinary Business Results

By John D. Doehring

An e-book from J. Doehring & Co. - for your firm’s growth, profit, and success.

Copyright 2014 John Doehring

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This e-book is licensed only for your personal use, and it may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it wasn’t purchased for you alone, then please return to Smashwords.com (or your favorite retailer) and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work and effort of the author.

A Note on the Client Case Stories

In this book I’ve added a dozen short story vignettes, describing either clients we’ve worked with, or (in a couple of instances) organizations in which I was directly involved. All of these case stories are based on true situations and events. In most of them I have modified the details - people names, places, and business context - to protect the confidentiality of our client organizations. Any similarity to other, actual organizations and/or individuals is completely coincidental.

Table of Contents

1.Business Planning Today

2.Why Business Plans Don’t Work

3.Client Case Stories 1

4.Tips for Better Business Planning

5.Eureka! A Business Plan in Your Back Pocket!

6.Client Case Stories 2

7.Using the BackPocket! Business Plan

8.The BackPocket! Business Plan Template

9.Client Case Stories 3

10.Conclusion

11.About John Doehring

12.What Our Clients Say

13.Connect with John Doehring

The State of Business Planning Today

Throughout the year, organizations of all types and sizes are busy with business planning. Some do their planning at the end of the year, others at the beginning, and some at the mid-point. During this time senior executives, operations managers, and market champions are often found in a whirlwind of sorts - working out the details of revenue goals, client targets, and various business improvement objectives. Many are busy doing it – but few are doing it well.

Unfortunately too many of these managers are simply going through the motions, a low-passion effort of modest revenue growth, transferring of unachieved prospect lists, explaining (sometimes in nitty-gritty detail) why last year's most important initiatives simply didn't happen. It’s as if publication of the plan itself is the ultimate objective. It's not.

Plans are nothing, planning is everything.

Dwight Eisenhower

That's too bad. Extraordinary leaders know that business planning should not be about the planning, but about the business! The purpose of the effort is to improve the organization and its chances for achieving future growth, profit, and success.

Effective business planning has never been easy, but in today's superfast world it's ever more challenging. There are several reasons for this.

First, we’re all distracted. Today there is simply too much of everything – data, information, analysis - and people, shouting at us both inside and outside the firm. With all of this uber-noise around, focusing our attention on the most important stuff is challenging.

Second, much of the world experienced a significant economic downturn over the last several years, and though conditions are improving, during the slowdown many managers picked up some poor habits. With the collapse, focusing on the very short term (and indeed on organization survival) made good sense. Five or more years later, this over-focus on the short term looks a lot more foolish.

Third,