Whether you’re a solo-entrepreneur or part of a startup team, outlining your growth plan is essential for tracking progress. Regardless of whether you plan to seek investor funding or bootstrap your business, you need to have a clear vision of your company’s growth over time. Being able to analyze progress to-date, under/over-performing sales initiatives, and departmental successes is crucial for ongoing company planning. Creating a business plan helps you clarify company goals, outlines your objectives for onlookers, and gives you a solid roadmap to follow as your business grows. If you want to up your business planning skills as an entrepreneur, following are five top tools you can consider integrating into your growth strategy:
Strategyzer
Strategyzer lets you build business plans for your team and tweak your plans as your company grows. Integrate everything from your company’s value proposition to your key business partnerships and management structure. Assign tasks to specific team members, outline your customer segmentation plans, and estimate costs for key growth initiatives.
RoadMunk
RoadMunk is an awesome roadmap planning tool for busy entrepreneurs. Create visualizations for your team or for potential investors to showcase your business’ plan of action. Elaborate on planned projections, outline your timing strategy, and even spotlight which departments will be responsible for specific growth initiatives.
Big Boss
Big Boss is another excellent business planning resource. Features include project management tools, task assignment interfaces, meeting monitoring tools, and business document management too. Track customer support conversations, access your data from your office or your mobile device, and specify access permissions for your company’s confidential data.
Creately
If you and your team want to build a better business plan, Creately is a must-discover resource. Incorporate anything from organizational flowcharts to product development scatter plots into your company’s planning structure. Creately offers collaborative content creation, enabling each member of your management team to oversee the accuracy of their department’s data in your business’ overall planning documents.
Geon Estimator
If your team utilizes GitHub as part of your development plans, the Geon Estimator tool makes a cool addition to your business planning toolbox. Create company tasks, break your task planning into subsets, prioritize task delegation, and track project estimates too. You can even monitor updates to your plans thanks to the handy built-in changelog.
Outlining your company’s plan to profitability doesn’t have to be a boring task. Instead of dry documents that will bore business partners, consider integrating a variety of terrific tools like those listed above into your document creation strategy. Not only will your business plans be more inviting, they might even attract more attention from investors or company collaborators. Will you be using any of these handy resources to up your business planning efforts?
