Strategic planning in the time of pandemic

Mar 2 2021

23rd March 2020 will be remembered for many years as it was the day that Boris Johnson announced for the UK that people ‘must’ stay at home and certain businesses must close. The impact on the business community was far reaching uncertain, and many companies still do not know what the future holds for them.

Established plans in March 2020 were very likely developed around assumptions about the business environment that have not come to fruition, and based on a continuation of what had gone before. As a consequence, their content and projections will bear little relationship to what actually happened over the following year. While many will have included a certain amount of ‘flex’ to accommodate risks and uncertainty, it would be interesting to know how many had sufficient tolerance and flexibility to accommodate the scale of changes over the following 11 months – it is likely to be very few!

So what is the implication for the “corporate/business plan”; and if they have proven to be of limited use for most of 2020 and into 2021, are they still needed?

The inaccuracy (or inadequacy) of plans in the past does not mean that planning for the future is not an invaluable activity. Just because your last walk in the countryside did not go as intended does not mean that you shouldn’t take the time to consider what you want to achieve and taking a map and compass next time you go! The quality of your navigation on the second walk should be improved from what you learnt when you went wrong the time before.

Similarly, creating business plans is even more critical now. The process of creating a business plan should force an objective assessment of all influencing factors from the likely progression of markets and hence the market opportunity, to the future ability to be paid by key clients and all other factors that will influence your business performance. Simply expecting trade to continue as it is, (or how it was before the pandemic) will not be good enough.

While any business plan developed now is likely to have very wide tolerances for any projection to allow for the inherent uncertainty, the process of assessing everything to create a viable plan will be an invaluable exercise, and force areas of risk to be recognised and addressed.

If you want to improve the value from your planning process, contact Collcutt Associates to discuss how we can help.

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