Why is planning so important? To achieve your goals and ambitions the business needs to have a coherent plan that pulls together the resources of the business to meet the demand for its products or services. The plan will be based around key assumptions for the business. However, as much as possible should be researched in order to reduce the amount of subjectivity in the plan. Our business experts are not just financially qualified they also have several years of commercial experience in growing businesses, and are therefore ideally placed to challenge assumptions that might be used for the plan. What does planning achieve? Assuming that a business has demand for its products and services then a business is limited by its resources. Growth will be constrained by the limiting factor which is likely to change over time and might include funding, floor space, personnel, etc. What planning achieves is focus on the optimum mix of resources to take advantage of demand. A continuous monitoring of plan to actual is an inmportant tool for owner/managers to control the business which will become more complex as it grows.