Repeat this step monthly for the rest of your business life. A going business is always revising its plan. Change is constant. Follow your review schedule monthly. A real business plan is never done. If your plan is done, your business is done.
The workable lean business plan is the first step in a planning process that will help you steer your business and optimize your management to get what you want your business to do for you. Follow up with the review schedule, review plan vs. actual results every month, and keep your plan alive and growing. Keep it lean, keep it live.
Experts know that planning is to manage change and is not voided by change. As your business evolves, so will your business plan. You’ll add pieces to fit the needs. You’ll need to add product and marketing information to coordinate development, deployment, messaging and timing. You’ll have to add to your financials to account for loans and capital equipment, which become part of a balance sheet.
The normal lean planning process is what I call the PRRR cycle, for “plan, run, review, and revise.” This is my lean-planning version of the traditional lean business technique that started with lean manufacturing and also includes the lean startup.
If you needed to adapt the textbook's planning chapter for startup management, search for a job in environments unknown to you, or another unstructured activity, what changes would you make?