Strategic Advising Resource Library
Build and grow your advising skills.
Featured session – Celebrate SBDC Day with LivePlan
America’s SBDCs provide no-cost expert advising to help entrepreneurs succeed—and they’re using LivePlan to make business planning and forecasting simpler than ever.
In this webinar, the LivePlan team highlights how SBDCs are innovating to enhance the way they support entrepreneurs through powerful planning tools and expert guidance.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur looking for guidance or an advisor seeking tools to better support your clients, this webinar will give you the insights you need to take your business planning to the next level.
LivePlan Learning — Growth Planning
Introducing growth planning—a process to help you continuously plan, forecast, review, and refine your financial strategy to better manage your business. Whether it is a start-up or a business you have been running for years, growth planning is the answer to the frustrating, time-consuming, and inflexible task of putting together a traditional business plan.
Growth Planning Basics (Session 1)
Part 1 of this series showcases the starting points and basics of growth planning for any entrepreneur, at any stage of business.
Learn the growth planning process:
Create a plan: Quickly size up the potential of your idea and set goals to make it work. Build your forecast: Develop an expense budget and financial projections to better understand where your business is now and where it is headed. Review the results: Compare your forecast against your actual sales and expenses each month to stay accountable and uncover new ideas. Refine your strategy: Adjust your business plan and forecast based on your learnings.
Skill level: Novice – Intermediate
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Growth Planning Applied (Session 2)
Part 2 of this series shifts to the application of the forecast to ongoing problem-solving, client cases, and the cyclic nature of growth planning.
Deeper-dive topics will include:
Review & Compare Plan vs. Actuals: Add accounting data to a LivePlan forecast to track progress and adapt to change each month. Explore techniques to keep your entrepreneurs accountable over time and uncover new ideas. Build What-if Scenarios: Explore the real-life questions and problems that entrepreneurs face, and how LivePlan’s Forecast Scenarios can help you explore their options and set a path for their desired Growth Planning goals. Using Benchmarks: Discover the additional benefit of a forecast by comparing Plan vs. competitors, and uncover competitive advantages or areas for strategic improvement. Refine your strategy: Adjust your business plan and forecast based on your learnings.
Skill level: Intermediate – Advanced
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Financial forecasting
Learn how to use LivePlan’s extensive forecasting features to inform and guide your client’s business management and growth processes.