Growing a successful Company

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning.

Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance so you can adjust your plan on the fly, quickly and easily.

Before I dive too deeply into the Lean Planning methodology, it makes sense to talk about its history and where it comes from.

It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans Lean Planning started with Tim Berry‘s 2008 “Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan” which was a new way for entrepreneurs to think about planning. Instead of encouraging entrepreneurs to focus on developing long and in-depth, static business plans, Tim advocated for a simpler approach:

1.Define your business identity: What’s your value proposition to your customers?

2. Determine your target market: You need to know and understand your customers.

3. Build an action plan: How are you going to validate your assumptions and measure progress?

4. Develop a forecast: Basic forecasts and budgets are critical; And tracking them is even more so.