Page 43 - Law Society of Hong Kong MPMC Manual v8 - With checklists (1 March 2018)

Practice Management Course | Unit 5
Business Planning

UNIT 5: BUSINESS PLANNING

Introduction
Understanding strategic and business planning processes is critical for effective practice
management. In this unit, we focus on how to prepare and implement a business plan to set goals
and delineate the future direction of the practice. Developing such a holistic plan allows
practitioners to articulate the practice’s overarching vision and specify the concrete actions to be
taken to achieve that vision as it entails providing an overview of the current state of the practice,
the strategic goals of the practice, the process for achieving these goals, and the process for
measuring results.

Objectives
At the end of this unit, you will be able to:

• Collectively apply knowledge gained from Units 1-5 to create a holistic business plan.

Business Plan
1. Every 12 months, the practice needs to prepare and adopt a Business Plan to guide
its operations for the next 12 months. This plan will reflect the practice's decisions
on its position in the market place, its future direction and its mission. The
stakeholders need to agree on the Business Plan, then monitor and evaluate the
plan.

2. In simplest terms, a Business Plan asks and then answers four basic questions,
which sum up every business and its aspirations:

• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get there?
• How do we measure results?

Where are we now?
3. This question is answered by undertaking a thorough practice audit or analysis that
encompasses both the operational and the strategic situation that exists in the
practice now. The information revealed provides the base on which a successful
plan can be built. The thoroughness of the practice audit or analysis will have a
major impact on the success of the plan. Unless the practice can recognise where it
is now, it will never have a clear picture of how far it has to go. Also, there will be
no clear benchmark against which success can be measured.

The operational audit
4. The best operational audits and analyses involve data collected from everyone in
the organisation. This is time consuming. However, it is an investment in the future
ownership of the plan by those whose lives it will affect.

5. Anyone can write a Business Plan but it will never be accepted if it fails to reveal a
thorough comprehension of how the business operates now at all levels. When
people are consulted, they begin to feel part of the process. They start to believe in

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