We at CCCC strongly advocate annual business planning. Perhaps this idea is
new to you. If so, with reason you might ask, “Why get into planning at my
company?” Perhaps you have no complete idea of what planning could offer you or
perhaps you feel you don’t need planning yet. Why not take a few minutes to
answer this brief questionnaire. Then you will be better set to judge for yourself if
you should consider any step towards planning as an option for your enterprise.

To proceed on with the questionnaire, please indicate with an “x” at all items from 1 to 20
that you believe are occurring, regularly, within your organization. When done, score your
total and read A Simple Questionnaire’s* interpretation that follows.

1. Low morale
2. Budgets not met
3. Negative cash flow
4. Insufficient teamwork
5. Meetings are too long
6. Sales quotas are not accepted
7. Changing priorities too frequently
8. Individual responsibilities are not clear
9. Inadequate top-to-bottom communications
10. People don’t know what the real priorities are
11. Organization slow to respond to market needs
12. People, not situations, are blamed for problems
13. Too much administration, not enough production
14. Departments concerned primarily with themselves
15. Not enough information received about what is going on
16. Department (or organization) revolves around one person
17. Management too ambiguous on what it wants from subordinates
18. Sales people have sales orientation rather than profit orientation
19. People are expected to agree – even if they don’t know what about
20. Hard to predict how ‘actual’ results will conform to ‘budget’ results

Write down the total from the previous page here:__________

Interpretation of the Score Results for your Company

0-5 You are running well and probably won’t benefit so much from more
planning.

6-10 You can probably expect a 10% to 15% gain in sales next year, if you
introduce a Planning session for your team.

11-15 We think you no longer really have much choice; support for your
enterprise has to be done. Proper planning would get this organization
off what appears to be its present treadmill. (Possibly the company is
standing at no-sales-growth, or at a not-as-profitable-existence-asdesired level.)

16-20 We believe action is needed now! Strategic planning would help the
company significantly. A properly organized planning session would put
you on the road to turning ALL these issues around, some more than
others.

A planning session led by an established planning process can deal with all the
issues indicated in the questionnaire above. While most of the issues
themselves will not be resolved within the typical 2-day planning session, all of
the issues can be confronted and a plan laid out for dealing with them, one-byone, over the next six months or so.

* A Simple Questionnaire: Note that any questionnaire is limited in the depth of
understanding it can offer. Yet, you can be fairly confident that if your score is
very low, your company probably is doing most things right.

Conversely, if your score is very high, your company probably needs to pause
and ask questions. Specifically, your team should stop and examine what it is
doing and how it is going about it.

Planning offers a solid way to address most, in fact we believe all, of such
concerns. Ask us how.

Good luck,

Bill Caswell