Small Business Planning Pillar #5: How To Build Content Rapidly

Small Business Planning Pillar #5: Rapid Content Building

If strategy is your small business planning backbone, then limbs are the mini-strategies and content the flesh surrounding them.

I’m a veteran of many small business planning documents and over the years haver developed a technique to build content that leaves me feeling energised and highly motivated. It’s important that you get detail into your planning as quick as possible without losing the buzz. See what you think:

1. Copy and paste your small business strategy and mini-strategy statements into a new document. These immediately form the headings for your business planning content.

2. Where possible, carry an electronic copy with you at all times, perhaps a notebook PC. Personally, I prefer to use my Blackberry which is almost surgically implanted now (so I am told at home).

3. Stop thinking about the business. Allow your mind to wander, go on a bike ride, take the dog for a walk, hit the gym, do anything but attempt to write for long periods.

4. Be ready for a regular attack of quite brilliant thoughts to appear from your subconscious and have Blackerry to hand (or similar) to take notes. Each attack should last no longer than sixty seconds.

5. Each evening, spend a few moments cutting and pasting each comment to its rightful space in the small business planning document. Suddenly you find that rather than dragging your feet through pages of uninteresting critique, you are filling the void with soundbytes of inspiration and insight. The change is quite dramatic.

And easy to explain. Man apparently thinks about sex every seven seconds. Coincidentally, his average concentration span also happens to be seven seconds. This could mean that he thinks about sex for seven seconds, then thinks about it again for another seven seconds and so on – in other words all the time. Or it could mean that he thinks about sex for seven seconds, then thinks about something else for seven seconds, then back to sex again…..

Personally I’m doubtful. Option 1 sounds simply too exhausting and option 2 suggests that if you wrote a piece about entrepreneurship for an hour, it would have 514 references to sex in it. Your only hope then would be that the reader’s concentration was in step with yours so that he didn’t notice the sex references at all…………

………but I digress. Whatever the exact science, concentration spans are very short. So rather than trying to fight against it, energise yourself at the moment your next great thought lands, note it in that moment and then let the moment pass. You are working in harmony with your mind’s natural rhythyms and freeing it up quickly ready for the next one. All makes perfect sense.

Exactly what should be covered in your content is another question. As discussed in Pillar #1: Mindset, your small business planning document is for you and should make sense to you. It therefore follows that you know best of all what content needs to be included. Your strategy headings are a pretty good starting point and if you know your business well enough, you will instinctively know when you have worked your planning hard enough ready to expose to the outside world.

If you don’t trust your instinct, then fear not as Pillar 8 discusses failsafe plans to ensure that you don’t drop a complete horlicks at your first presentation.

Ten Pillars Of Small Business Planning – Introduction

Small Business Planning Pillar #1: How To Start A Business Plan – Mindset

Small Business Planning Pillar #2: Strategy

Small Business Planning Pillar #3: Mini Business Strategies And Postage Stamps

Small Business Planning Pillar #4: Changing Gear: Seed Money & Intrapreneurs

Small Business Planning Pillar #5: Rapid Content Building

Small Business Planning Pillar #6.0: The Four Financial Statements

……Small Business Planning Pillar #6.1: Profit And Loss Statement (P&L)

……Small Business Planning Pillar #6.2: Cash Flow Statement (Forecast)

……Small Business Planning Pillar #6.3: Balance Sheet Statement (Forecast)

……Small Business Planning Pillar #6.4: Financial Assumptions

Small Business Planning Pillar #7: Business Metrics