Research shows that the businesses who survive the longest are those that have a solid planning processes. Whether you are a large or small RTO having a formal written plans can ensure business growth and greater success. Your RTO’s business planning should describe what you do, how you do it and how you will keep on doing it into the future. Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Here is some advice to help you determine where you might need to improve your RTO planning processes.

Poor planning:

Developing a business or strategic plan should be a top priority to ensure you are focused on your RTOs strategies and goals related to business, markets, future and finances. Your RTOs planning framework should provide a system for aligning priorities, making decisions, allocating resources, and measuring its impact. The benefits of this approach will result in absolute clarity about your RTO’s mission, purpose, and direction; significant revenue and customer increases; value-based performance reviews; and increased engagement and satisfaction among staff. By making business planning a regular part of your annual calendar you can avoid costly errors and lost opportunities.

Failing to plan:

Too many RTOs make the mistake of thinking business plans are not relevant to what they do or unnecessary so they neglect to implement planning processes. This is a critical error as your business plans provide a roadmap to keep your RTO on track. Without proper planning you risk losing touch with your business and the moment something goes wrong or competition increases you are left floundering.

Missing the why:

Some RTOs get trapped in only focusing on the products and services they offer and forget to ask, “why?” Why do students and industry need your products? Why does your business matter to you and your customers? Answering these questions in your business planning clarifies why you do what you do and creates customer loyalty. To avoid this mistake always start your business planning process by reviewing your mission statement. This should help you get to the heart of the “why” and will provide a strong platform for the rest of your planning. The key to an effective business plan is to be explicit about who your customers are exactly and what pain point you’re going to address. By clarifying this you will be more accurate on the solutions required, and how you will be profitable.

Not being future focused

It’s important for RTOs to look ahead at the bigger picture not just the intricacies of what needs to be done tomorrow, next month and next quarter. Forecasting where you want your business positioned in the next 5 or 10 years provides the basis for your vision statement. It is hard to plan your present without first clarifying your desired future.

Not scanning your environment:

RTOs should conduct a thorough SWOT analysis that carefully reviews your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This analysis will help identify the weaknesses and threats that face your business and inform your planning. Developing a SWOT analysis will help you look at your business differently and with a new perspective. It will provide your RTO with a way to focus on specific goals, projects and objectives and enable you to identify ways to improve efficiency and productivity.

Ineffective goal setting:

Having vague goals or a long laundry list of goals sets your RTO up for failure. Measurable goals are necessary to ensure objectives and goals identified in plans can be achieved. If they are not specific enough how are you ever going to know if you are on track to achieve them? If there are too many goals listed in your plans you will not know where to focus your efforts. It is better to identify three or four critical goals and focus your planning around achieving those instead. Remember that your plans are not set in stone and you can be as flexible as you need to be. Be prepared to have to pivot and adjust your planning as required.

Creating verbose or dense business plans:

Honestly, less is more and your business plan doesn’t need to be longer than one page. It’s not about quantity it’s about the quality of the strategy and ideas you have determined you are pursuing. The planning is important but the doing is even more important so spend most of your time putting actions into place and avoid getting trapped in the preparation.

Failure to manage projects effectively:

Many RTOs neglect implementing formal project management processes within their business. Project based management is a generic skill required of all managers. Projects are a temporary organisation where resources are assembled to do work and to deliver a result or asset. Documenting your goals, identified risks, roles, timeframes and deliverables in project plans allows project managers clear oversight of resources allocated. Failure to deliver the desired product or service occurs when businesses have inadequate systems in place for planning and executing of projects.