A strategic business plan is the foundation for the planned strategic actions necessary to outthink and outlast the competition. Within the strategic plan is the strategic action plan that records all of the hits, misses and even errors for the current as well as past year. NOTE: A simple strategic plan definition is who does what by when and its construction is dependent upon the analysis of real time information.

With the current year quickly coming to an end, now is the time to review the business hits and misses for the last year. Success in business is directly tied to how much time is invested in working on the business instead of just in the business. These 7 top tips can quickly double your business results in 2007.

Tip One: List all of your hits. Hits are all revenue from the sales of your products and services.

Tip Two: List all of your misses. Misses include:

Lost proposals
Lost contracts and sales
Lost opportunities such as not asking for referrals
Lost performance from management to employees

Tip Three: Assign a dollar value to all of your misses. Then compare the results from this tip to Tip 1. Note: As a business coach, I have discovered that this simple reflection may create significant pain for the business owners, entrepreneurs or executives because they have been so busy working in their businesses they have failed to work on their businesses.

Tip Four: Learn the causes of the misses. Misses may be the result of poor job specific skills from sales to customer service, poor planning or lack of individual accountability. This real time information is necessary when constructing your Strategic Action Plan.

Tip Five: Identify your desired business results for the next year. Using the W.A.Y. S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria (W-Written, A-Aligned, Y-Yours, S-Specific, M-Measurable, A-Attainable, R-Realistically set high and T-Target date, time driven), you avoid those past missed opportunities and turn them into homeruns for the next business quarter or business year. These goals are based upon data received from the previous 4 tips.

Tip Six: Construct your business dashboard. By identifying key performance indicators and monitoring these on a daily or weekly basis, you can determine that your firm is operating at peak performance and quickly make any necessary course corrections to achieve the desired business results.

Tip Seven: Make a weekly appointment to work on your business. Schedule at least 1 hour each week working on your business. Use this time to review both your dashboard and strategic business plan. Your strategic plan (Who does What by When) should also include, but is not limited to your marketing plan, sales plan, growth plan and financial plans. Using your dashboard and other tools including organizational assessments, you can quickly monitor your business progress and become a proactive decision-maker instead of a reactive one.

If you are considering starting a business making a business plan is a good idea. A professional business plan can help you become more successful in your business. All businesses plans have an executive summary.

The executive summary should be no more than two pages and you should write one rough draft before you start, which is an overview of your business plan and then rewrite the whole executive summary after you are done with your business plan so it matches. It should be a synopsis of the entire plan itself.

The business plan should have pictures or renderings of your future building, business equipment or service vehicles. No matter what you have decided as your profit goals and additional capital costs and order time it will take to get the business going; you need to double the time, half the profit and triple the capital costs.

No matter how good your business plan is it is a proven fact that entrepreneurs are optimists and often they will become undercapitalized because they do not understand all the ridiculous over regulation placed by government agencies or the amount of time it takes to get something through a city planning commission. I hope you’ll consider all these factors when you are making your business plan. So, think of this in 2006.