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Essential Business Plans For Start-Ups - Individual
Hoshin Plan Part 2
In this series of two articles and in continuation to Part 1, I have described the key aspects for starting or
expanding the business.
Section 3
In this section, I have introduced two levels of plan.
1. Readiness Plan - If you have decided the launch date of your business, then there will be a set of
things that is to be accomplished before that date. For example, identifying a brand name, registering
your company, enabling necessary technology, renting an office, etc. A readiness list can contain the
silliest of things that one feels is needed before the implementation date.
Readiness Plan is drawn by brainstorming and is kept updated from time-to-time. It acts as a scheduler of
tasks that lead up to the launch.
Most start-ups and business expansion teams have this list.
2. Tactical Plan - A tactical plan contains Business Tactics.
After launching the business, one would need to know how to accomplish the vision, mission and
strategies. Each of the strategies mentioned may be very broad & high level.
And here is where even big corporations fail. They might have an excellent strategy document with well
researched information of competition, customer and market, but when it comes to executing the strategy,
even the Business Head can't correlate actions to strategy. Mostly it happens by trial & error and more so
by impulse rather than by planning.
In order to draw a robust tactical plan, assess how much are you away from the target for each of the
strategies. This is usually done by looking at past performance for existing or expanding businesses.
But for start-ups, it can be done by an idea generation session or by finding out what competition is doing.
For example, if the strategy is to target Small & Medium Enterpri