Most businesses don’t have a plan

Through the years, we’ve spoken to hundreds of business owners about their business plans and their planning processes. More specifically, we’ve asked them individually and we’ve polled them as a group at our seminars to determine if they have a business plan of any kind and how they use it.

Initially, we expected that a fair number of them would tell us that they had some type of business plan and that they followed that plan throughout the year. Boy, were we wrong.

Approximately one in 20 business owners told us that they had a business plan of any kind. At first, we thought that this low number somehow might be due to the particular attendees of our seminars. Somehow, perhaps, we were getting the “non-planners.” ...

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