That’s the question my wife and I ask each other every day about 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon. We have pretty busy lives with multiple businesses, children, hobbies and activities to manage. So, probably just like you, we need a plan on how to get it all done!
If a plan is important for getting a family through the day, how much more important is a plan for an insurance agency with customers to serve, sales to make, companies to satisfy and employees to manage? It’s critical….
But who has time to plan with all that going on you ask? That’s a great and valid question. The other one for the typical Type A agency owner is “can I get someone else to do it for me?” and “what’s the minimum planning that will yield the most impact?”
Assuming you have goals to meet and would like every day to be something other than crisis management, let’s take a look at this from a high level. In my experience growing businesses need two plans at a minimum: a business plan and a marketing plan.
So, a business plan sounds like work doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be. Really, this process is as simple as putting on paper your 3 to 5 year goals and general means to achieve them. For example, what are sales going to be each year for 3 years? Net profits? What is your ideal business mix? What kind of customers do you want to serve, what do they look like demographically? How many employees does it take to get this done? A plan can be a whole lot more complicated, and potentially more valuable, but with lots to do this is a great start.
The second plan is the marketing plan. It supports the business plan in that it answers the questions “how are we going to get customers, how many and when?” It can be complicated but really it’s simple. If you know your numbers (see my earlier post “What’s A Customer Worth to You”) you know how many customers you need based on estimated retention, average value and your business plan goal. So, the marketing plan just lays out how you will get them, when and what that will cost.
These can be really simple documents. But they are important because they take you through the present into the future and teach you how to prepare. They also get the whole staff on the same page. They remind you every year, quarter and month the critical things you can’t forget to do if you want to keep growing.
So, who’s picking up the kids from school? That’s something important to plan for! So is where’s our next customer coming from...