How can You Benefit From using Mind Mapping in Your Business Planning

Many people just think of business planning as "writing business plans". Sure, business plans are important, and help you understand the direction of the company, but there are many other plans that you need to put together to keep your business on track and growing on a day to day basis. There are a number of problems with "traditional" business plans. They are difficult and boring to write, difficult to understand, and most people don't follow them. Replace them with Mind Maps and the whole scene changes. You now don't need to start at the beginning and work to the end - you can just put in branches for your ideas as you think of them. Your planning efforts are clearly based around your overall goals and objectives, so everything is on topic and focused. When you give the plans to other people (or get them to collaborate on putting them together), they can see why all the different parts fit together and why they are necessary, and how they can contribute. So let's have a look at some key places you can use Mind Mapping to make your business more productive. Mind Mapping Your Vision / Mission Statements Do you remember the vision or mission statement of the last company you worked for? Did you actually understand all the bits that made up the vision, and why they were there? If you're anything like me (and everyone else employed at all the places I worked), then you probably didn't really read or understand the vision statement, and it had no impact on what you did in the job or how you did it. In many businesses, it's like the owner or board of directors had a "planning seizure" one day and produced this document that got pinned to the wall somewhere, and has been steadfastly ignored ever since. Well that whole scene changes when the vision statement is done using Mind Maps. The visual nature of the Mind Maps means that they are noticeable, colorful and easy to understand. The linkages between the overall company goals and the specific things that the company does to implement the things that lead to achieving the goals is clear. You can see at a glance what the company is all about and how they are going to achieve the vision. When a group of people get together and create a shared vision, the first thing is to create an appropriate central image for the Mind Map - sometimes this act alone brings clarity to the vision and purpose. Each person will see how he or she fits into the overall picture and will have a better understanding of the organisational direction. The vision defined in these maps can cover the corporate strategic plan, a one year vision, or a short term project. Too often professionals spend enormous amounts of time working in isolation on their part of a vision statement or project plan while the entire team shares little communication and does not understand the direction, or buy in to it. Taking a short amount of time with the entire group to create this vision will save time, money, and frustration. Now that's something that the staff can buy in to. That's something you can use in your marketing. That's something that becomes part of the company culture. And that's what a vision statement should be! Using Mind Maps for Your Task Lists Whether planning a day, a week, a month, a year or your life, a Mind Mapped task list is a dynamic, interesting and beautiful way to get the use of your time in order. Begin by creating a new Mind Map and placing the time frame for the tasks in the centre. Next, conduct a brainstorming session. In most situations, your work will be goal focused, in which case, create branches for each overall goal for the period and then break the overall goal down into a series of smaller tasks. In the case that your tasks are more time based, you may end up putting the tasks onto a day-based planner such as the one shown here, and then put sub-branches for the tasks. Once you have this, you can create checkboxes on the branches to check off as you complete each item. You can also add priority markers so that you always know what's most important. One thing that I have heard recommended over and over again is keeping a journal of all the things you have learned from the tasks you have done and decisions you have made, so you have a permanent reference to it. I would suggest that a better way of doing your journal is that you create Mind Maps of the things you have learned and the decisions you have made. Using Mind Maps, you can easily refer back to your notes and understand the context, see what the information was, and assimilate it at a glance. And when you create a Mind Map to record the information, you cement it more securely in your brain for easy and quick recall and use in planning future tasks. Planning and Managing Goals using Mind Maps Defining, setting and working towards goals is as important for a company as an entity as it is for individuals. People, be they employers or employees, feel most fulfilled in their work when they feel they are achieving something - using a Mind Map to plot and chart goals, for the company and for individuals within the company, increases staff satisfaction and gives them direction and inspiration. They can see why the goal is necessary, how all the tasks fit together and how they fit in and can contribute. Mind Maps can even be used as an alternative to the traditional performance review documentation - allowing employees to chart their own career progress in a creative and dynamic format. The Mind Map below shows an example of this, where you can see that the major objective areas are identified clearly, and there is room for recording information relating to each of the topics as the conversation progresses. It can also be used for self assessment prior to the interview. This ensures that the review can be brief and to the point and cover all the required aspects without missing anything. Performance reviews can be based on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are also written up in Mind Map format. Negotiated KPIs not only give employees a sense of empowerment, they also give managers an interesting insight into the mindset of each staff member. By asking staff to set their own KPIs, you are really asking them to reveal what they think their job is, their confidence level in what they do, how motivated they are and their ambitions within the business. Have employees brainstorm KPI ideas on a Mind Map. Have them do this by placing their job title or name in the centre and then creating a parent branch for each of the responsibilities that they regularly perform. From here, they should look at each responsibility and add branches that relate how they feel they are currently performing, whether they enjoy the activity, improvements they think they could make and finally, what they believe the KPI should be for each of these activities. Your Business Plan How often have you seen business and marketing plans that people have slaved over for hours merely flicked through (if that!) by staff members, investors and sometimes even the business owner themselves? Even investors and venture capitalists who need to understand the business plans in order to make their investment decisions get thoroughly bored looking through boilerplate business plans day after day. That is no way to wow them into investing in your company. It is no way to get your staff to buy into the company direction - they can't even understand all the pages of boring text. As any good salesperson knows, you have to know everything you can about your products or services in order to persuade someone to buy them. In this discussion, you are the salesperson and your products represent your business. Your customers are potential investors and employees. Since you want your customers to believe in you, you must be able to convince them that you know what you are talking about when it comes to your business. You must be willing to roll up your sleeves and begin digging through information. Since not all information that you gather will be relevant to the development of your business plan, it will help you to know what you are looking for before you get started. In order to help you with this process, we have developed an outline of the essential elements of a good business plan. What needs to be in the plan? Every successful business plan should include something about each of the following areas, since these are what make up the essentials of a good business plan: Executive Summary Market Analysis Company Description Organization & Management Marketing & Sales Management Service or Product Line Funding Request Financials Appendix Mind Mapping your Business Plan Using Mind Maps for your business plan is an effective way to ensure the business plan actually gets used. The point of a business plan is not to reach a certain number of pages or to display the size of your vocabulary - it's to map out where your business is, where it is heading and how you're going to get there. By Mind Mapping this plan, you are forced to be concise. Mind Mapping doesn't allow for long sentences and big words - you have to think of the shortest, clearest way to express the concepts you want to communicate - try limiting yourself to one word, or dispense with words altogether and represent concepts with meaningful graphics. When setting up a new business it is useful to create a Mind Map to show what your goals and aspirations are and what things you need to think about when setting up your business. Then you need to define your business - where you define your company values, target market, levels of service etc, so you know who you are as far as the market is concerned. You will also want to create a Mind Map of the entire organizational structure for the "finished" business, including job descriptions, so you can plan ahead for the way the business will be when completed. It may well be that you put your name beside every position to start with, but as you grow, you will be able to take a main branch at a time and hand that off to someone else, and progressively move down to the leaf branches as the company grows. How to create a Mind Mapped Business Plan Place the name of your business in the centre and use a picture that you think describes it. This doesn't necessarily have to be the company logo, perhaps it is a picture of what you want to achieve via your business. Now, from the centre the parent branches will be titled: Marketing, Financial Management, Management, Service and Sales. Marketing I recommend that your 'Marketing' branch is a link to an entirely new Mind Map that focuses solely on your Marketing Plan. Financial Management For the Financial Management branch, use sub-branches to ask and answer the following questions: What is our start-up budget? What is our ongoing budget? What type of accounting system will we use? What are our sales and profit goals for the next 12 months? If you are a franchisee, will the franchisor expect you to reach and retain a certain sales level and profit margin? What financial projections will we need to include in our business plan? What kind of stock control system will we use? Management Split the Management branch into two sub-branches: 'Management Team' and 'Staff' (if staff is appropriate) and ask and answer the following questions. Management Team How does my background/ business experience help me in this business? What are my weaknesses and how can I compensate for them? Who will be on the management team and what are their duties? Are their duties clearly defined? What are their strengths / weaknesses? If operating a franchise, what type of assistance can I expect from the franchisor and will this assistance be ongoing? Staff What are our current personnel needs? What are our plans for hiring and training personnel? What salaries and holidays will we offer? If you are a franchise, are these issues covered in the management package the franchisor will provide? What benefits, if any, do we offer? Do this rapid-fire using what we call "branch storming" where you just add branches as quickly as possible and force your brain to come up with a word for each branch, so that you can capture the essence of your thoughts and feelings. Remember, this is a brainstorming exercise, so there are no wrong or silly answers. You'll go back later and expand or delete points and ideas as you need to. Service and Sales There are four keys to excellent customer service: trust, knowledge, efficiency and friendliness. On your Service branch, answer these kinds of questions: Why can our clients trust us, our products and our service? What do we know that makes our clients lives easier? How do we exhibit efficiency in our dealings with our clients? How can we ensure our clients think of us as their trusted friends? On your Sales branch, think about the process that your clients will go through to buy from you - that is from the time they walk in the store (or contact you to enquire about your product or services) to the moment they settle the final bill. How to Use the Business Plan Mind Map Mind Mapped business plans are great for presenting information to investors and franchisees, as they allow logical connections between items to become immediately clear - much better than a 60 page text document that nobody reads or understands. At the same time, the Mind Map is also presenting a one-page overview of the business. This allows people to understand the concepts you are trying to explain to them much quicker, making those funding requests and franchise sales that much easier. Using software makes the Mind Mapping process a breeze. When dealing with the specifics of the business directions, you'll find it easy to brainstorm the ideas, adding them at the appropriate place and rearranging as necessary, all at the click of a mouse. Updating the business and marketing plan becomes less of a chore when these plans are put together using NovaMind. The software makes it easy to move ideas around and add and delete ideas as necessary. You could even turn the Mind Map into a large poster that could be displayed in your offices - one of the many cool things about Mind Maps is that they are appealing to the eye and so become an asset you can be proud of showing to employees, clients and suppliers alike. Best of all - Mind Mapping makes the planning process fun! The brain is naturally attracted to the process of Mind Mapping. The colours, images and process will ensure you'll never be stuck writing boring plans that you know will never be read by (let alone be of use to) anyone else!