CEO & Cofounder, BoardPro
Brett Herkt, BoardPro CEO and co-founder explains why well-structured and thorough business planning can help NZ financial services businesses stay on top of regulation and ahead of the competition…
The New Zealand financial services sector faces an unprecedented deluge of compliance obligations with new and impending legislation imposing complex reporting burdens on a wide range of entities from advisers to investment managers to asset owners.
Good corporate governance, of course, is the key to both meeting these onerous regulatory compliance standards and building more sustainable businesses.
But many firms either coming under regulation for the first time – such as the thousands of newly formed Financial Advice Providers (FAPs) – or simply under-resourced at the governance level, may struggle to articulate these risks and opportunities in formal documents that offer a clear business action plan and keep regulators happy.
The annual operations planning process is where all the magic happens, but many businesses fail to approach the task in a structured way. And that’s why we created our FREE eBook – 8 Steps to Beautiful Annual Operating plan, to provide businesses with a simple, comprehensive set of templates covering the planning process, facilitation, budget summary and operating plan.
An annual operating plan is a prized document – it’s the blueprint for building your organisation in any given year. You wouldn’t build a house without architectural drawings.
Unfortunately, many leaders of FAPs run their organisations with only a sketch of what they are building. To help entities upgrade rough drawings to more polished plans BoardPro has developed a free eBook targeted towards the leaders of commercial organisations with revenues between $2 million and $40 million that have a functioning management/leadership team (three or more managers) that lacks a strong track record of strategic/operational planning.
How to step from annual business planning nightmare to dream result…
Like many business leaders, I have run an annual planning exercise with suboptimal results. In my early days, it was horrible – rushed preparation, lack of alignment, personal agendas at the board table, weak commitment, lack of diverse thinking – and I tried to create, run and contribute all at the same time! The outcome was frustrating and poor.
The good news is that annual planning is a craft that can be mastered.
Here’s how to run a low-stress process to produce an annual operating plan that:
- is consistent with your purpose and vision
- involves the wider leadership/management group
- incorporates feedback loops
- produces diverse business thinking
- is financially robust
- aligns the board and leadership team
It includes a set of ‘cheat-sheet templates’ and ‘simple guides’ for managing the process and delivering the outputs. Once completed the management team should have an agreed action programme and results to which it will willingly commit itself.
Our 8-Steps to a ‘beautiful annual operating plan’
After reading the plan, you should know precisely what those involved:
- intend to do;
- by when;
- what they need to achieve it; and,
- what are the expected results.
Please click here to download the FREE eBook or contact BoardPro as per the contact details below for further information.