Into the Blue NZ Limited

Business Planning helps to plan for the short-term, to avoid the daily chaos of not knowing what job to do next. It also helps with planning for the medium and long-term, for example knowing when you will run out of capacity and will need to make the decisions to avoid these capacity issues.

This service covers short, medium and long-term planning. It includes being able to make a plan “on the fly” (create an immediate work-around) for urgent issues, plus planning for known or possible future events such as capacity or staffing issues.

Business Plans should be a major tool in every business’s arsenal. We will help you to write multipurpose Business Plans that will help you to better identify your key business drivers and competitive advantage, provide robust forecasts which can help to raise capital for the purchase of new or replacement assets, develop employee incentive schemes based on business profit improvement, etc.

This service will cover:
• A self-analysis of what your business currently does and how well it does it.
• Identifying your competitive edge / advantage.
• The Owners goal / mission for the business.
• Business strategy to achieve the owner’s goal. The strategy, while containing stretch, must be achievable.
• Current and planned resources to meet strategy requirements.
• Market analysis including market opportunity, market structure, new services and target market size and outlook. A customer survey will help with understanding customer mindsets and behaviours.
• Competitor analysis.
• SWOT analysis covering both internal and external influences.
• Marketing strategy and budget to meet the strategy.
• Setting realistic and measurable targets including key ratios and benchmarking.
• Developing Action Plans to achieve targets.
• Financial Plan (budget / forecast) covering three+ years derived from the above analysis and strategies.
• Business continuity planning.

This service is to help owners to understand what strategy really is including the three key elements of good strategy, how strategy helps to identify “your point of difference” and give your business a competitive edge. We will also help you to identify the key items to achieving the strategy and the development of an Action Plan to implement the strategy.

Business Strategy often confused with Vision, Mission Statement and Business Plans is most intricately linked with Action Plans.

This service will help to identify the 1 or 2 critical issues to achieving your business’s required goal(s). These are the pivot points that multiply the effectiveness of effort. You then focus and concentrate action and resources on these pivotal points, as they will become your point of difference and give the biggest bang for your dollar.

A good strategy contains three key elements:
• A Diagnosis – the key issue(s).
• A Guiding Policy – approach to dealing with the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
• Coherent Action – feasible co-ordinated policies, resource commitments and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy.

The two vital components of good strategy:
1. Having a coherent strategy – one that co-ordinates policies and actions. A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength, it creates strength through the unity of its design.
2. The creation of new strengths from subtle shifts in viewpoint. The most powerful strategies arise from game-changing insights.

A good strategy has two natural advantages:
1. Other organisations often don’t have a strategy and don’t expect you to have one.
Good strategy is as much about what a business does not do as it is about what it does.
2. A good strategy comes from insight into new sources of strength and weakness – looking at things from a different or fresh perspective. Not every good strategy draws on this kind of insight, but those that do generate the extra kick that separates ordinary from the extraordinary.

An insight when acted on can provide a more effective way to compete – the discovery of hidden power in the situation (point of difference).

One business’s success is often at the expense of another’s failure to implement effective strategy to compete in the marketplace.

This service will help owners to become more aware of the importance of market analysis, planning, strategy, branding and digital enablement to sustain their business’s success. It will help identify threats and opportunities in the marketplace, long-term strategies for the future direction of the business and how to harness the benefits of digital enablement.

Market Analysis, Planning & Strategy
• Identify and review every sector you currently operate in plus new sectors you may operate in
• Self-analysis of how well you operate in each sector
• Analyse the effect of a possible crisis (Covid-19) on each market sector
• Implement a strategy to target the least affected and fastest recovering sectors from a major crisis
• Customer analysis and customer profiles
• Are you meeting customer expectations and ways to exceed those expectations including customer management?
• Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing
• Complete a competitor analysis which is key to keeping your competitive edge
• Developing your competitive advantage in the marketplace
• Build your business’s resilience

Branding & Digital Enablement
• Is your brand still relevant to your products, services, and customers?
• Design a brand that is up to date and relevant
• Ensure the market knows your full product / service offering
• Design an up to date website
• Keep your website fresh and up to date including the blog page
• Write blogs / newsletters that can be sent to customers via Mailchimp
• Link digital messages and articles to social media outlets

This service will enable you to:
• Establish an ‘agile’ marketing program / plan to align with identified channels to market
• Develop a target list and strategy for attracting new high value customers
• Develop a marketing strategy to achieve your goals – it should contain stretch but be achievable
• Current and planned resources to meet strategy requirements
• Market analysis including market opportunity & structure, new services, target market size and outlook
• Customer surveys help to better understand customer mindsets and behaviours
• Complete a marketing strategy and budget to meet that strategy
• Set realistic and measurable targets including key ratios and benchmarking
• Develop Marketing Action Plans to achieve targets

This service is to help business owners and senior managers to develop and or expand their business process skills to improve business efficiency, reduce waste including rework, remove complexity and improve the business's sustainability.

We will help you to develop expertise in:
• Business Process Improvement - Improve or develop business processes that follow the critical path and so eliminate duplication and waste (rework) plus remove complexity to enable improved business efficiency.
• Business Systems - identify the key business system requirements within your business and complete a needs analysis to ensure that they are not only meeting your business requirements current needs but are as efficient as they can be, do not include unneeded complexity and will meet your businesses planned needs.
• Financial Management - To ensure financial systems and reporting are aligned with the business and will easily identify both revenue mix changes and underperforming areas of the business. Key financial drivers (KPIs) are implemented to monitor key aspects of the business. These will all help to make more informed financial and management decisions.
• Business Planning - Enabled to help not only with future planning but the smooth day to day running of the business.
• Business Sustainability - Business planning, processes and systems will help you to recognise what needs to be done to improve your business's sustainability in the marketplace.
• Resource Management Planning - being prepared and knowing when you need to purchase new, replace old or release surplus resources.

This service is to help new and existing business owners to investigate their new business idea to establish:
1) If they want to pursue their idea and
2) Turning their idea into a reality

This service will help to develop expertise in:
• Business Sustainability - develop and write plans that outline what you want to achieve over the next 5 years including: market size, market share, barriers of entry, timetable, capital investment, competitors; working capital, SWOT analysis, etc.
• Business Planning – develop plans to avoid the daily chaos up to longer-term planning requirements.
• Business Processes - develop processes that follow the critical path to eliminate waste (rework) and reduce business efficiency.
• Financial Management - reporting by business segment identifies mix changes and performance by segment. Key business drivers help make more informed decisions.
• Business Systems - identify key business system requirements that will meet both current and future requirements.
• Capital Raising - Business Plan to include capital requirements and timings of spend. It can be used to obtain bank facilities and loans.
• Governance (working on the business) - developing practices to enable you to have dedicated time to work on the business.
• Procurement - best practices including supplier reviews.
• Resource Management Planning - knowing when to purchase or replace resources.
• Marketing strategy - know your competitive advantage. Tailor your marketing to your target market and market conditions. Increase your value proposition from a client perspective.
• Customer Satisfaction - ensure clients are happy. Communications are key. Annual customer surveys to get a better understanding of what they think you could do better. One-on-one's with key clients to promote your business and ensure that you are still relevant.
• Human Resource Planning - plan resources to meet demand, don't over-staff. Know the timeline to employ and train new staff plus the subcontractor employee trade-off. Understanding team dynamics and staff culture.

This service is to help owners identify what they need to do to prepare for the day the owner wants to leave or transition the business from one owner to another. The service helps the owner to identify the various strategies to ensure that firstly there is a business to sell, and secondly that the maximum value possible is extracted from that sale.

In theory, the Exit Planning process should be a natural extension of your Business Plan, but in reality, for most SMEs there has been no real or significant business planning hence the need for an Exit Strategy and Succession Plan.

The Exit Process varies from the usual business planning process in that it specifically identifies key strategies that will make your business more attractive to potential purchasers (grooming) and should also make it a more profitable and more sustainable business.

This service will cover:
• The exit issues
• The exit alternatives including family succession, internal sale and external sale
• Transition options
• Market Analysis including identifying a potential business sale target market
• Base business valuation based on current and historical results
• Business valuation methodologies and value creation including and how they will impact on the base business valuation.
• Potential risks

The goal is to have a business that is both ready for sale and attractive to potential purchasers at a price that you are happy with when it becomes time to exit your business.

Please note not all business owners want to sell their business’s on completion of this process as the steps taken in grooming the business for possible sale can often lead to reduced work hours and a reinvigoration to carry on with the business for a while longer.

This includes:

• How to read Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet Statements.
• Reporting by business segment to better identify both segment mix changes and underperforming areas of the business. This includes the establishment of segmentation gross margin reporting to easily identify product/service mix and under-performing areas of the business.
• Developing clear management performance indicators and identify key business drivers to help you to make more informed financial and management decisions.
• Ensuring there is integration between the financial systems and the day to day operation of the business
• Establishing a monthly reporting function around financial targets that are aligned with the business objectives.
• Establishing monthly staff meetings either formal or informal to gain feedback on how the business is performing
• Establish procedures and systems to check for irregular payment
• Financial analysis and modeling to establish trends and one-off events to enable accurate forecasting and other reporting.

This includes:

• Both product and service costing models to ensure that you are making the required margins on all product and service lines.
• Project / Capital costing models to ensure that you know the true cost of purchasing and or operating both new and existing plant and equipment. This will also help in product costing to ensure that you are getting the required returns on capital.
• Capacity planning so that you are aware of potential bottlenecks, know when it is time to either invest or devest in plant and equipment, know how quickly you can ramp up for increased demand, etc.

This will allow you to determine the current value of your business and to be able to enable strategies to increase that value if you decide to sell the business.

This includes:
• Are owner / management (leadership practices) and employee cultures aligned?
• Is the Team aligned in its work practices and culture? Understanding of Team dynamics.
• Establish any HR requirements - plan for the resources to meet customer demand.
• Align employment contracts towards both the strategic plan and business model. This includes the subcontractor / employee trade-off in times of skill shortages or variable demand.
• Staff training and development to align with individual staff requirements.

This includes:

• Retaining contact with employees working from home.
• Setting up employee networks re their health & wellbeing.
• Helping owners to set up or join networks to ensure that they are able to cope with both the effects of any crisis effecting their business and the daily stresses of owning and running a business.
• Providing a sounding board for business owners during times of stress. These stresses can come from both the business itself and for family owned businesses the continued working and living with members of the family.