# Lean Business Planning **Tim Berry** | [[Action]]  --- > "Planning is like dribbling in football or basketball: managing details while keeping your head up to see the bigger play." This reframes what planning is for. Most people treat business planning as a document—something you write once for investors or lenders, then file away. Berry argues planning is a **continuous practice**, not a one-off artefact. The plan isn't the goal. Execution and adaptation are the goal. > "Accounting goes backward in time; planning goes forward." You can't manage a business by staring at historical financials. You need forward-looking forecasts and milestones that force you to make commitments, track progress, and adjust when reality diverges from expectations. Berry's gift is radical simplification. Lean planning strips away the bloat of traditional business plans—the 40-page decks, the exhaustive market analysis, the fictional five-year projections—and replaces them with a **living document** focused on strategy, tactics, milestones, and key numbers. This isn't for the bank. It's for you and your team. --- ## Core Frameworks ### [[The Lean Planning Method]] Lean planning has four essential elements: **Strategy** (what you're doing and why), **Tactics** (how you'll execute—marketing, product, pricing, sales), **Concrete specifics** (milestones, responsibilities, deadlines, budgets), and **Essential forecasts** (sales, spending, cash flow tracked vs. actuals). The cycle: Plan → Execute → Track → Review → Revise → Repeat. Traditional planning fails because it's a one-way process. Lean planning succeeds because it's **iterative**. You're never "done" planning—you're always refining based on what you're learning. ### [[Strategy as Subtraction]] Berry quotes the Michelangelo principle: **strategy is carving away everything that isn't David**. Most companies fail not from lack of ideas but from lack of focus. They try to serve everyone, sell everything, compete everywhere. Strategy is the discipline of saying no. > "Strategy is like driving and sex—we all think we're pretty good at it." Real strategy requires trade-offs: if you're serving everyone, you have no strategy. Identity matters—who you are determines what opportunities you pursue and which you ignore. Key strategic questions: Who are we serving? (Not "everyone"—be specific.) What problem do we solve for them? What makes us different? (Not better—different.) What are we deliberately *not* doing? Strategy isn't about creating more options. It's about **choosing fewer, better ones** and committing resources to them. ### [[Plan vs. Pitch]] Berry distinguishes between two types of planning documents. **Internal plan (for you and your team)** is short, practical, constantly updated. Focus on execution: milestones, metrics, accountability. No fluff—bullet points and simple tables. Lives in a shared document everyone can access. **External pitch (for investors or lenders)** is story-driven: problem → solution → market → traction → team. Numbers support the narrative (but narrative comes first). Polished, persuasive, designed to secure funding. Created only when needed. Most people confuse these and create neither well. The internal plan gets over-polished and becomes unusable. The pitch lacks story and becomes a data dump. ### [[Milestones and Accountability]] Plans without milestones are just aspirations. Milestones create **accountability**. What makes a good milestone: **Concrete and binary** (either done or not done—no "80% complete"), **time-bound** (has a deadline), **assigned** (one person is responsible, not "the team"), and **measurable** (you can verify completion). Examples: ✓ "Launch MVP to 50 beta users by end of Q2" (assigned to Sarah). ✗ "Improve customer satisfaction" (vague, unmeasurable). The power of milestones: they force **decision-making**. You can't set a milestone without committing to something specific. ### [[Forecasting as Learning]] **Forecasts aren't about being right; they're tools for learning.** Traditional forecasting fails because people treat forecasts as targets (then manipulate numbers to hit them), forecasts become static (no one updates them when reality changes), and focus is on precision (fictional accuracy to two decimal places). Lean forecasting succeeds because you **track actuals vs. forecast** (the gap teaches you what you don't know), **update monthly** (forecasts improve as you learn), and **focus on the critical few numbers** (sales, cash flow, key expenses). The point isn't to predict perfectly. It's to **make assumptions explicit** so you can test them and adjust. --- ## Key Insights Most "strategies" aren't strategies—they're goals ("grow revenue") or tactics ("run Facebook ads"). Real strategy requires trade-offs: if you're serving everyone, you have no strategy. **Tactics are the execution layer: what you'll actually do.** Keep them as bullet-point lists, not prose. Marketing reduces to: help customers **know, like, and trust you**. Product-market fit beats perfect execution of the wrong product. **What gets measured gets managed**—but only measure what matters. Milestones create urgency and accountability. Review schedules should be **built into the plan** (e.g., monthly review meetings). Distinguish between leading indicators (predict future performance) and lagging indicators (report past performance). **Cash is oxygen**—you can survive without profit for a while, but not without cash. The cash flow forecast is the most important number for small businesses. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, **cash is reality**. Track payment terms, burn rate, and runway obsessively. **Investors invest in people and traction, not spreadsheets.** The pitch structure: Problem → Solution → Market size → Secret sauce → Team → Traction → Ask. Show momentum: customer growth, revenue growth, partnerships, validation. Numbers matter only if the story resonates. **Planning isn't just the CEO's job—it's cross-functional.** Sales, product, finance, and operations all need input. **Transparency matters**: everyone should see the plan and the actuals. Regular review meetings create rhythm and discipline. > "The business should serve your life and values, not the other way around." --- ## Connects To - [[Playing to Win]] - Strategy as subtraction; both emphasise choosing what *not* to do - [[The Fifth Discipline]] - Planning as a continuous practice aligns with learning organisations; feedback loops between plan and reality - [[Better, Simpler Strategy]] - Berry's "what makes us different" connects to WTP/WTS; strategy creates value gaps - [[How Finance Works]] - Forecasting forward vs. accounting backward; cash flow as the critical metric - [[Algorithms to Live By]] - "Before you can have a plan, you must choose a metric"—Berry forces explicit metric choice --- ## Final Thought You don't need a 40-page deck. You need clarity on strategy (what you're doing and why), tactics (how you'll execute), milestones (what's due when), and key forecasts (sales, spending, cash). Planning is a practice, not a document. The value isn't in the plan you produce; it's in the rhythm of planning, tracking, reviewing, and adjusting. This creates organisational discipline—the muscle memory of looking forward, making commitments, and learning from variance. **Milestones create accountability.** Vague goals ("grow the business") let everyone off the hook. Concrete milestones ("launch to 50 beta users by June 30, Sarah responsible") force decisions and make progress visible. That transparency is uncomfortable—which is exactly why it works. Business planning fails when it becomes performative—something you do for investors or because "you're supposed to." It succeeds when it becomes **operational**—the tool you actually use to steer the business. Strip away the fluff, focus on the essentials, and review relentlessly. That's lean planning: less document, more discipline.