- The plan is just paper. The planning (thinking it through with your team, then checking it every quarter) is what moves a business.
- Start with four questions: where are you, where do you want to be, by when, and how.
- Grow the customers you already have before chasing new ones. Turn 2 purchases into 3.
- Choosing what not to do is the real strategy. Sometimes subtraction is addition.
- A plan works only if it fits on one page, every goal has a number, an owner and a date, and you review it every quarter.
These are my notes from a business-planning masterclass by Rangan Mohan, a CEO coach with 36 years of running and advising IT companies. He calls himself "the poor man's McKinsey": the same thinking, but the person who sells you the advice is the one who sits with you and does it.
The session was for small and mid-sized businesses. I've kept his ideas, added an example to each, and put my own additions in a clearly marked section at the end.
Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.
The session opened with a line from US President Dwight Eisenhower: "Plans are nothing; planning is everything."
The business plan is a document. Next year it will change. Some years it changes next week. What lasts is the process: sitting down with your team, looking at the future together, agreeing on where you're going, and checking how you're doing as you go.
Why small businesses skip planning
Rangan named three reasons he sees again and again:
- Daily work eats the time. Orders, staff and fires come first, so planning gets pushed to "later".
- The future feels uncertain, so we retreat to today. Today's sales and today's production are easy to look at. Next year is not.
- The plan stays in the founder's head. Even when the owner has a plan, the team often doesn't know the goal, so everyone pulls in a slightly different direction.
That last one matters most. If the team isn't aligned on the same goal, a good plan still creates confusion.
Start with four questions
Before any new idea, product or yearly plan, answer these four. Everything else in planning is detail under them.
- Where are you today? Real numbers: revenue, customers, team, cash.
- Where do you want to be? The same numbers, at the size you're aiming for.
- By when? A date. Without one it's a wish, not a goal.
- How do you get there? The few big moves that close the gap.
A small digital agency that serves clinics.
Today: 4 clinic clients, ₹3 lakh a month, 2 people. Destination: 40 clinic clients, ₹25 lakh a month. By when: December 2027. How: one fixed offer for clinics, referrals from happy clients, and hiring two people by mid-2027.
Rangan's advice: plan big. Look three to five years out, then break it into quarters. Watching growth quarter by quarter tells you early whether you're on track.
Mission, vision, goals, strategy: in plain words
These four words get used loosely. Here's what each one means, using the same agency example:
Break each goal down until the next step is easy to start. "40 clients" is a goal. "Ask our 4 current clients for one referral each this month" is a step anyone can take on Monday.
Know your market potential, not just your sales
Market potential is everything the whole market could buy of what you sell. It is not your sales forecast, and it's not what you sell today. Looking at it properly can show you room to grow that you'd never see from your own numbers.
A small company made ready-to-cook spice mixes (bisibele bath powder, vangi bath powder and similar) with a turnover of about ₹6 crore. It sold small packs of 20 and 50 grams.
When COVID hit, people couldn't eat out, so office-goers started cooking at home. The market for these mixes suddenly grew. The company switched to 100, 250 and 500 gram packs. Sales rose fast, and the extra money paid for a bigger distribution network.
Nothing about the product changed. They just looked at what the market could now absorb, and changed the pack size to match.
Grow the customers you already have
New customers cost money and time to win. Rangan's "2 to 3" idea is simpler: if a customer buys 2 of something a day, how do they buy 3? If they visit twice a year, how do they come three times?
Every growth move falls into one of four boxes, depending on whether the customer and the offering are existing or new:
The clinic agency runs Google Ads for a clinic. Top-left: add a second location or a second treatment to the same campaign. Top-right: offer WhatsApp follow-up for the leads the ads bring in. Bottom-left: sell the same ads package to a new clinic. Bottom-right: launch a new product for restaurants. That last one carries the most risk.
Choose what not to do
Two lines from the session stuck with me: "Don't do everything for everybody" and "Sometimes in life, subtraction is addition." Choosing what to do is easy. Choosing what to stop is the real strategy.
A simple way to decide: put every activity on a revenue-versus-effort grid.
The same goes for who you sell to. Business customers (B2B) and consumers (B2C) buy very differently: B2B buys slower with bigger orders, B2C faster with smaller ones. Decide which fits your business instead of drifting into both.
Cut costs in the right order
When money is tight, don't cut everything equally. Sort every cost into one of three buckets first:
| Bucket | What's in it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Mandatory | Salaries, rent, the tools the business can't run without | Keep them, but negotiate prices |
| Nice to have | Extra software subscriptions, a bigger office, unused services | Cut these first |
| Capital → operating | Big one-time purchases: machines, servers, vehicles | Rent, lease or subscribe instead, so you pay as you use |
Also look for repeated tasks. Rangan's point on AI: agentic AI tools exist to take repetitive work off people's desks, such as follow-ups, reports and data entry. That cuts both effort and cost.
Plan for surprises
The future won't follow your plan. COVID, a new law or a lost client can change everything in a week. Scenario analysis just means asking "what if?" before it happens and deciding your response in advance.
| Scenario | What it looks like | Signal to watch | What we'll do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best | Two big clients sign this quarter | Proposals accepted | Hire early, don't wait |
| Likely | About one new client a month | Monthly signups | Follow the plan |
| Worst | Biggest client (40% of revenue) leaves | Late payments, fewer calls | Cut nice-to-haves, push referrals |
Rangan also mentioned trend analysis (where are our numbers heading month by month?) and causal analysis (why did this number change?). Run the first every month, and the second whenever a number surprises you.
The classic planning tools, in one table
You'll hear these names in any planning session. Each one answers one question:
| Tool | The question it answers | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| SWOT | What are we good and bad at (Strengths, Weaknesses), and what outside helps or hurts us (Opportunities, Threats)? | Once a year, when setting goals |
| PESTEL | Which outside forces could change our business: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal? | Before a big bet, e.g. a new data-privacy law hitting how you store customer data |
| Porter's five forces | How tough is this market? Rivals, new entrants, substitutes, and how much power buyers and suppliers have | Before entering a market or setting prices |
Your customers have changed
With AI and the internet, customers can now compare products as well as an expert can. A mediocre product gets found out fast. So two things matter more than before:
- A real reason to be chosen. Rangan calls it building business strength: why should a customer prefer you over everyone else? If you can't answer in one sentence, neither can they.
- Innovation that starts with customers. Build what customers keep asking for, and aim for growth you can sustain, not one lucky spike.
He also pointed out that market data is cheaper to get than ever. Paid reports and online databases can sharpen your view of who buys and why.
Get everyone on the same page
A plan only the founder knows doesn't work. Share it: the mission, the goals and the numbers. Then turn it into a budget, an action plan and a resource plan (who works on what).
Rangan mentioned a management forecasting system: a regular, simple check of the forecast against actual numbers. For a small business it can be one meeting a month and one sheet with the same few numbers each time.
My additions: what makes a plan actually work
Everything above is from the masterclass. This section is what I'd add, from running projects and watching plans fail.
- Fit it on one page. If it needs a deck to explain, nobody will check it in June.
- Every goal gets a number, an owner and a date. "Grow sales" is not a goal. "Abhay: 10 new clinic clients by 31 March" is.
- Track three numbers every week. Pick numbers that move before revenue does, like calls booked or proposals sent. Revenue tells you too late.
- Write a "not doing" list. It makes the subtraction real and stops old ideas creeping back.
- Write down your assumptions. "Clinics will pay ₹40,000 a month." Check each one every quarter. When one breaks, the plan changes. That's planning working, not failing.
- Celebrate when you hit a milestone. The session's host made this point too. People repeat what gets noticed.
A one-page plan you can copy
| Section | Write one or two lines |
|---|---|
| Where we are | Revenue, customers, team, cash, as of today |
| Where we want to be | The same numbers at the target size |
| By when | The date, plus the next quarter's milestone |
| How (3 big moves) | e.g. one fixed offer, referrals, hire one person |
| Grow existing customers | How each customer buys 3 instead of 2 |
| Not doing | What we're stopping or saying no to |
| 3 weekly numbers | The numbers we look at every Monday |
| Assumptions | What must be true for this to work |
| If things go wrong | Our worst-case signal and response |
Do this this week
Take 30 minutes and answer the four questions (where you are, where you want to be, by when, how) on one page. Then show it to one person on your team and ask what they'd change. That conversation is the planning. The page is just the plan.