Business Plan
A Bristol-based tech founder messaged me last quarter, three days after submitting a £150,000 Innovate UK Smart Grant application. He had drafted the entire plan using ChatGPT over a long weekend, polished it carefully, and submitted it with reasonable confidence. …
In twelve years of running SGI Consultants, I have watched hundreds of UK founders make the wrong call on this single decision. A Manchester founder last spring paid £200 for a templated plan, submitted it for a £75,000 Start Up …
Most small businesses are fighting a war they cannot win. They’re competing in markets where several established players are already entrenched. They’re differentiating along the same two or three dimensions that every competitor does. They’re trying to take customers from …
The most transformative growth move I’ve seen small businesses make is rarely a new product, a bigger marketing budget, or an extra hire. More often, it’s a partnership — a carefully chosen relationship with another organisation that opens a market, …
I want to tell you about two businesses I worked with in the same year, operating in the same sector, generating roughly the same turnover. One was growing confidently, and the owner was sleeping well. The other was lurching from …
I’ve sat across the table from hundreds of business owners who could tell me exactly what they wanted their business to look like in three years. Bigger team, stronger margins, more locations, better clients. The vision was never the problem. …
I’ve worked with business owners at both ends of the exit journey. Some arrive with years of runway ahead, asking the right questions early. Others arrive in crisis — a health issue, a partnership dispute, a market shift — needing …
I’ve reviewed thousands of business plans over 12+ years. The pattern I see most consistently is this: founders pour energy into the market analysis, the financials, and the executive summary, and treat the operations plan as the section they’ll fill …
I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. A founder spends eighteen months building something genuinely good — a product with real merit, solving a real problem — and then launches it in a way that guarantees mediocrity. …
In the autumn of 2019, I was working with a hospitality business that was performing well. Good occupancy, strong margins, a growth plan that was credible and well-funded. We did the standard planning work: revenue projections, cost models, and a …
