Page 115 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business

106 • Business Plans that Work

or eliminate them. The operations diagram also helps entrepreneurs to
identify personnel needs. For example, the diagram provides an indica-
tion of how many production workers might be needed, dependent upon
the hours of operations, number of shifts, and so forth.

Ongoing Operations

This section builds upon the scope of operations by providing details on
day-to-day activities. For example, how many units will be produced in a
day and what kinds of inputs are necessary? An operating cycle overview
diagram graphically illustrates the impact of production on cash flow.
As entrepreneurs complete this detail, they can start to establish per-
formance parameters, which will help monitor and modify the produc-
tion process into the future and test assumptions regarding competitive
advantages. If this is an operational business plan, the level of detail may
include specific job descriptions, but for the typical business plan, this
level of detail would be much more than an investor, for example, would
need or want to see in the initial evaluation phase.

Lazybones Operations Plan

Section 5: operationS plan

Operational efficiency is one of Lazybones’s greatest
strengths. Years of constant refinement and enhancement
of our processes have resulted in the company owning
Clearly states its
operational competitive scalable systems that allow thousands of pounds of laundry
advantage to be done to the highest quality levels by a small number
of hourly employees. The work is supervised by tracking
key system-generated metrics.

Identifies how op-
erations add value to the 5.1 local Systems
customer. It also illustrates
that textured systems add
more value than human Laundry
inputs. These kinds of
company secrets increase
valuation. Our local systems are designed to organize low-wage,
minimally trained workers.
Careful job design separates the workload to narrow
the responsibilities at each workstation and collect data