How to Structure a Small Business Action Plan (Excel templates)

If you run a small business, I suspect you’re forever alert to a better way to juggle the thousand-and-one tasks that make up your work week. And there’s no shortcut here. As every scenario is unique, you need to investigate which tools, hacks, or frameworks work best for you. For most of us, this means looking at tools like Evernote, Notion, Getting Things Done and other frameworks. While they all have merit, their value depends on your own specific use case. What works for one person, may not work for another. 

So, with this in mind, I decided to re-examine how I run my business at a granular level. Right down to the ‘nitty gritty’. Part of this is creating atomic action plans.

To get things started, let’s refresh our memory on how to setup an action plan for your business. In the next set of articles, I’ll show you how to interleave ‘smart notes’ and the protocols we use in the Klariti framework.

While it does take a little time to setup, it offers considerable long-term rewards.

Why you need an Action Plan template?

If you want to create an action plan for your business, I recommend that you download the following sample guidelines?

You can use these guidelines to create a MS Word template to convert your business goals, plans, and ideas into an effective Action Plan.

Remember, the best way to write these documents is to make it simple and easy for others to use, especially for marketing activities.

5 Year Action Plan

[Learn more about these MS Word and Excel templates here]

What is an Action Plan?

Let’s say you decide to start a new business, go to college, or setup a new marketing campaign. You know what you want do but you’re not sure how to get there. This is where you benefit from using an Action Plan.

Definition: A series of activities that must be performed for a plan to succeed.

In other words, you’re going to identify all the key tasks you need to perform to reach this goal, and then put a plan in place that lets you accomplish this as effectively as possible.

Next, let’s look at the structure.

How do you structure an Action Plan?

Your Action Plan will have three parts:

1. Tasks – this identifies what will be done and by whom.
2. Time – this shows when these tasks will be done and in what sequence
3. Resource – this identifies what people, funds and tools are needed for specific activities.

Next, let’s look at how to format the Microsoft Word template.

[Learn more about these MS Word and Excel templates here]

How do you format an Action Plan?

If you’re using MS Word to create your Action Plan template, then use the following guidelines to format, style, and develop the content.

Create a Table of Contents that covers the following topics:

1 Introduction

1.1 Vision

1.2 Mission

1.3 Objectives

1.4 Strategies

1.5 Areas of Impact

1.6 Points of Contact

1.7 Assumptions

1.8 Constraints

1.9 Dependencies

2 Management Structure

2.1 Organization Chart

2.2 Roles & Responsibilities

2.3 Anticipated Change

3 Action Plan

3.1 Implications for staff involvement

3.2 Enhance practices

3.3 Evidence of success

4 Continuous Monitoring

5 Outcomes

5.1 Participant Outcomes

5.2 Organizational Outcomes

5.3 Community Outcomes

6 Project Budget

You may not need all these sections for your plan, so modify the sections that suit you best.

 

[Learn more about these MS Word and Excel templates here]

Tracking

Remember to add a Document History section to the cover sheet, so you can track all the changes made to the document. This makes sure there is one master copy in circulation and reduces any confusion that might exist otherwise.

In this next tutorial, we look a sample action plan and the mistakes to avoid when getting started.

Connecting dots

Over the following weeks, I’ll break down the approach I took to find the optimum way to operate my web business. As you can imagine, this involves false starts, setbacks, and a fair bit of persistence. The good news is that I stumbled across (lots of exploring) a framework that’s new to me. It’s to do with taking smart notes. In tandem with this approach to note-taking, I’ve also started to switched from long-term plans to more granular, atomic plans.

If you’re interested in this, sign up for the newsletter as I’ll keep you abreast of how it works.