There are Five key stages in your Business Financial Plan. Having a clear financial plan in place is essential for any small business, arts organisation, social enterprise, or SME. Creating one can seem like a daunting task. However, when broken down into the five key stages it becomes less of an overwhelm.

With my guidance, you'll ensure that all areas of your operations are considered and nothing important falls through the cracks.

Listen if you want to get ahead with your Business Financial Plan!

Conclusion and good to know

So listen to discover the five key stages that you need to go through to produce your business financial plan. Success, however you define it, is what we all want.  I guarantee if you don't have a financial plan in place then your will not progress as you want it to.  Furthermore, you're going to be stuck where you currently are right now, maybe making some small incremental changes.

If you really want to propel your business forward and achieve what it is that YOU want to achieve, then absolutely 100% put a financial plan together following these steps.  It will make all the difference in the world not just for yourself but also for your team around you as well.

Are you a small business owner, social enterprise or organisation passionate about change? Managing your finances can be a lot of work, trust me.  Finally, there’s software that makes keeping track of your cash flow and financial planning easier: Numbers Know How. It helps you stay organised so you can focus on what matters to you; the creative work and the impactful change. Take a step away from the chaos with fast setup & easy navigation – numbers just got real…for the better! Get organized & make sense of it all with Numbers Know How today!

Success, however you define what success looks like for you, likely to happen? You're gonna be going round and round in circles, and you're never gonna get to where you wish to get to. I've been asked several times in the 27 plus years of running my business as how does one go about producing an effective financial plan for a business?

And in this week's, I Hate Numbers Podcast, I'm going to share that with you. I'm gonna share five key steps that you need to go through in order to produce that effective, robust financial plan that's gonna help you power your business forward.

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers Podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Hi folks. Welcome to another weekly episode of I Hate Numbers. This is the podcast that's there to increase your financial awareness, help you win more battles than you lose for what goes on between your ear lobes. Help your business, make more profits, save tax and time. What a wonderful combination that is.

My name is Mahmood and I'm an accountant and business finance coach and proud author of the book, I Hate Numbers. I run two main businesses. I run an accounting firm called I Hate Numbers and a financial storytelling platform called Numbers Know How links in the show notes at the end if you care to check those out.

Let's crack on with a podcast now. Step number one is attitude. For me, attitude means different things to different people. We hear attitude. We might think of anger, happiness, sadness. Whether we take things seriously or whether we take them lightly. Your attitude, your mindset to the future, to what goes on through the windscreen of your business is paramount.

Your aspirations, your motivation is driven by your attitude to your business and to those around you. And what we're after is we're after a good, strong attitude, a good, strong, positive outlook, a belief in yourself, and a look beyond the next two or three weeks, applying a good, strong attitude in your business,

when those times are tough, when things take the hurley burly, it's certainly gonna require your attitude to be at the top level. Now, I'm not talking about elite sports people here, but we need to make sure that we have a belief in ourselves. We need to make sure that when we look ahead to the future, we don't start planning based on restrictions at our first thought process.

So when you are doing an effective financial plan, you do not say, oh, I can't afford to do this. This is not gonna happen. Once those doubts seep into your mind, once those doubts and restrictions creep in, you are not gonna shape the business that you deserve. You've gotta have the right attitude to look ahead.

You mustn't be too overwhelmed with what might lie ahead? If you go too much into your financial planning and you start putting barriers up, start putting objections up, start getting overwhelmed by it all understandable that it may be, it will not be a good look for you. Go there with a positive can-do attitude, self-belief, resilience will be your best friend.

Having dealt with attitude, and we've summarized it at this stage, The next key step is about having a Northern Star, what you might normally call a goal or an objective. A goal without a plan is merely gonna be a wish, so you need to have an end point first in your financial planning. Now, this may sound counterintuitive.

A lot of people I know will start from where they are and start to build a plan up. That's the wrong way, in my opinion, of looking at it. Think about where you want to end up. What does your future look like in 12 months time, in two years time, in three years time? So typically with clients that I work with on a one-to-one basis,

we start off while actually trying to articulate and visualize where that endpoint will take them. What does it look like? Now, it's important at this point, folks, is not to think about your Northern star, your objective, your goals as wishy-washy things, you've gotta be able to articulate them, you've gotta be able to describe them.

You've gotta be able to see what they look like, and you've gotta be able to quantify them. The acronym SMART is commonly used to describe those objectives, and those objectives, by the way, can be both personal and business. They need to be combined. Now the SMART acronym is a good framework to use. When you think about setting your objectives and they stand for being specific, being clear with what your objectives are. Measure them.

Can you actually track what you implement? The A is acceptable. Is it acceptable to you? Is it has a Tinder realism with what you can actually achieve? Now, this is not me defining a limit of realism. Be realistic with the capacity that you've got, the risk appetite you adopt, the time that you have. So if you wish to conquer the world, maybe 12 months might be a little bit ambitious, three years, five years from now, conquering the world may be more realistic.

Relevance. Is it related to your business outlook, your business vision, and time bound? You're selling deadlines that are reasonable. So for example, financial objectives are absolutely key to any business, whatever type of business you have, whether it's a social enterprise, a private business, whether you've got a charity.

Profit making financial goals have to seep in there. So you may decide to say, instead of, I wish to be rich, I wish to be profitable, you need to translate that into a specific number. So it may be that you set yourself a target profit of a hundred thousand pounds, and that's something that's clear, that's definable.

You can look at it. Now, whether that is realistic in a context of where you start from, that's for you to decide. Now having looked at our attitude, having examined the goals that we want for our business, our Northern Star, what is step number three? Well, step number three is the story. Now, typically when I'm working with clients on a one-to-one basis, we don't even start with the actual financials at the beginning, the financials come later.

The financials reflect the activity, the journey you're gonna be undertaking. So we visualize and imagine a holiday that we're going on. We have our destination in mind. We are then gonna plan the route as to how we're gonna get there. We may think in terms of the pit stops that we take. We're gonna be thinking about what we need to take on our journey with us to make it more enjoyable.

We're gonna think about the obstacles, the, the road closures or the train stops to avoid and we've got a clearer path. Have your stories to start with. So once you've defined what your endpoint looks like, what your objectives are, you can then figure out the route you need to take to actually get there.

So what does that require in terms of skills and competencies that you've got to require? What does that require in terms of marketing activity? And it's no point just saying, oh, I've got to do some social media marketing. What does it actually look like? What type of marketing will you be going through?

And remember, it doesn't have to be too detailed and it's absolutely critical, folks, you mustn't start putting obstructions in your way. So many people that I work with, they might say, well, I can't afford to do X and I can't afford to do Y. I'm not sure if I can take somebody on. Well, those answers, those postulations that you're looking at will be addressed once your story comes together.

So think about what does the story look like? What's the journey you have to undertake? What's the activities that you have to do and think big picture to begin with folks. Don't worry too much about the anal detail at this first step. So once you've got your story path, you know the resources that you need, the marketing activities that you've got to invest in,

perhaps recruiting additional staff items of equipment. How do you connect with those customers that you've identified? How do you actually get to your end goal? Having looked at the first three steps, attitude, goals, and story, we can then think about the last two steps involved. Step number four is now the numbers.

We are gonna be translating our numbers from the activity plan that we've laid out and notice that the activity plan, by the way, hasn't got any financials in there at this stage. We're not thinking, oh we can't afford to do X, we can't afford to do Y. You need to think in terms of what is it I need to do in order to get to that end objective?

If we're gonna have another analogy, another example. Think about if you have an idea of getting to a certain target weight, certain target fitness, if you're gonna participate just in say an event. If you're gonna run a 5K distance and you've got a target of doing that in a certain level of time, then you've gotta think about the exercise you've got to do.

You're gonna think about what you've gotta do by way of dire in order to put yourself in a position where you can run 5K within a certain target time. No, you're not gonna stop and start and think, oh, I can't do this. You think about what you need to do to get to that end point. And it's the same with your business financial plan.

Think about the activities and then translate that. And at this stage, by the way, do not start saying, oh, I can't have this. It's too expensive. Put everything there, do a brain dump, translate it. And it doesn't matter if the story is perfect, we're not looking for a perfect story. We're looking for a first draft.

Now, finally, step five, having done the first four steps, that's having the right attitude to approach in our business. That's having our goals identified, that's having a clear story. And that's also now translating that story into financials. We then review that, and this is where the power of a story plan, a financial plan, comes into effect if you do it the right way.

Now for me, I draw that parallel with writing a blog. Dump it out there, put all the words on the paper, put all your ideas. You may have some shape behind it. It doesn't matter if it doesn't read perfectly. Do not edit as you go along. If you are somebody who literally proofreads each sentence as they write it, you are gonna take forever to get to the end point.

Dump it all down, go away, come back to it, and then you can start editing. You can start shaping it, and you can tighten up that blog article. You do the same with your financial. So for clients that I work with, we typically go through three or four iterations. The first cut can be rough, can be ready, can be ridiculous.

It doesn't matter. It's much easier to come back to something and think, ah, if I look at the shape of my financial plan, it's gonna put me in a situation where perhaps I'm not gonna have enough money to begin with. What can I do then to go back and shapen it up? Once you've got something in front of you, it's easier to edit it.

It's easier to fine tune that, easy to think about the things that could go well and things that could go wrong. If you're suddenly finding that you are short of cash at certain times of the year, then it gives you the opportunity to challenge the costs, challenge your assumptions, and as you go through, you'll refine the story and it'll click in terms of what's going on in that financial story plan.

So folks, I hope you found this a really useful five-step approach to producing your business financial plan. If you find that you could do with some additional supports, you could do with some additional help, well check out the show notes, the link to the Numbers Know How site, on the Numbers Know How platform.

We've got a platform, an online platform that's evolving. It's a community that we're building up whereby businesses, individuals can actually produce their own online plan, bulk upload features, graph charts, good ways to actually get that, or you can get involved in a one-to-one program. If that's something of interest to you, you then let me know. Finally now, if you found this episode useful, I'd love it if you could share some comments, perhaps share with those,

you think we'll benefit from that. Until next week, folks, think about your story and start writing your story today. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.