Today, we will continue with the fourteenth day in the challenge to improve your business in 77 days. This is the second part of the improvements that we will make in this challenge, or more specifically improvements of the business planning process as a part of your overall improvement process.
You already have worked on your previous business planning experience, forecasting, knowledge, business model and your business goals.
Now, we can continue with your business plan as a document, or something that will have the purpose to help you in better understanding of your current or future company activities. Today, your task will be to work on improvements of the graphs contained in your business plan.
Why Charts as a Part of Improvements?
The charts are powerful way to see the future of your company. They will easily tell you what is Ok and what is wrong. They will tell you where you need to change something and where you need to improve something. The graphs are something that will help you to define your future improvements.
As you already know, when we talk about the business plan, the form is not the most important element of the document that you will use. I want to emphasize the graphs as a part of your business plan, not because they will improve the visual look of your business plan, but because they are something very helpful for you as an entrepreneur.
What you will better understand, a narrative description of something in several pages or one big table full of data or one simple graph that will present everything from descriptions and each of the data from the table?
What You Can Improve in Your Charts?
First of all, you need to understand the need of charting in your business planning process. You will use them in the brainstorming process. You will use them when you want to see the previous performance of your company, you will use them in a comparison process…
They will be everywhere around you.
Use the following questions to find some possible areas of improvement.
- Do you use graphs when you are in the business planning process?
- For which elements of your business plan you use graphs?
- Are there some different elements that can be presented in the graphical form?
- Do you use colors in your graphs?
- What type of color you use for different elements?
- Can you standardize the colors that you use? For example, something important to be with the red color.
- Look at all of your graphs and ask yourself following questions: Can I find something important in several seconds when I look at the chart? Can I see the need for improvements? Can I base my decisions on this chart?
- What you need to improve in your charts if you want quickly to see important things, areas of possible improvements and future business decisions?
I hope that you as an entrepreneur can improve your charts if you want to improve your company in the future.
