Why Do Business Planning?

Welcome to the business planning module! This short, self-paced module will help you understand the basics of business planning and be ready to start your own business planning venture.

I’m Steve Orton, director of the Management Academy for Public Health. For more than ten years I’ve worked with hundreds of multi-organizational teams on business planning. I have worked with many managers and leaders from all different kinds of public health organizations. They come to business planning from a variety of backgrounds and for different reasons. Here are some comments I have heard when I ask why people want to learn more about business planning:

• “I have to learn to be more efficient.”
• “I’ve seen too many good programs fail when the grant runs out.”
• “Budget pressure keeps increasing. I need to generate revenue.”
• “I never studied business or finance and it seems important now.”
• “I need a new approach.”
• “I want to be able to work better with partners.”
• “I need to ‘speak the language’ with business people and my own business manager.”
• “One of my funders is requiring a business plan at the end of our funding cycle.”

People want to be able to create and fund the kind of programs that will really make a difference—not just for a year, not just for three years, but way into the future.

The range of possibilities is as broad as public health. I have seen multi-organizational business plans that address access to care, workplace wellness, data exchange, case management, bike safety, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, safe childcare centers, air quality, jail health, pre-term birth, and access to immunization in critical populations. In every case, the plan combines partners addressing a key community need with a new approach that can attract grant funds and generate revenue for long-term sustainability.