Educated marketers who are degree-holders and attended formal business schools would tell you that having a business plan is necessary. That it is very important for businesspersons to have one.

They would even go as far as mock the idea that conventional business planning are not necessities of the trade. In fact, for them, every business success depends on the sound and stable business plan one has.

Just imagine their consternation to find out that they are wrong. Nowadays, a business plan may or may not be part of your business agenda. A good business plan may help your business to stay in shape; but it is not as essential as it was back then. Some may even argue that plans only make any business constraining that it lessens one’s capacity to be flexible, which of course is an important virtue for a business owner.

According to the detractors, plans only confuse the marketer from having a strong and flexible business because it confines the owner to sticking to the plan even to the detriment of the business.

However, let us point out one thing: a plan is very much different from planning per se. Any business owner and marketer should be able to distinguish one from the other. If a plan is considered useless, planning then is necessary for any business to thrive.

So what is the difference? One came from the other. The plan is made from careful planning. Your plan therefore is based on the process in order for the marketer to come up with the plan. Business owners should therefore distinguish a plan as something like the catalog printing template, and the cheap catalog printing design of these templates as the planning part. In this case, without the process, there will be no output.

A plan therefore will not be realized without the planning part. If nobody knows about it or nobody is involved in planning it, how can it be implemented? The key to a great business plan is if everybody knows about, from the rank-and-file to the top-level management. Because everybody will be expected to act and make decisions based on what is in the plan.

In addition, as all plan goes, yours should be flexible – enough to go with the times and changes affecting the business. As such, everybody should know about the details and be capable to answer any query even if it changed regularly.

This also means that your business plan will not always be right; rather, it should be the right one for your business. It should be able to steer your business to the right direction; hence, it would need constant editing along the way, to fit the current times.

The point here is this: your business plan is nothing without any planning process to create the output. The more you make your planning sessions concrete, the easier it would be for you to change your plans to fit what your business needs at the moment.