I’m not sure I really understand why Easter is a moveable feast, but I do know its timing tends to coincide with our annual round of business planning.

As a company which specialises in advising growing businesses, it seems a bit strange to be talking about business planning as a date-driven exercise because, as we all know, business planning should be an ongoing process - not an event.

Having said that, it is good practice for a business, regardless of its size, to take time out to pause and reflect on the previous year and dedicate some time to thinking about how to develop the business over the next 12 months.

Easter, which falls around the same time as the financial year ends, seems as good a time as any to do just that. Key considerations should be given to your business’s products and services - which ones are growing, which are in decline and which ones are profitable.

This last point is really important as being a ‘busy fool’, where you are working hard on something that is ultimately detrimental to your business’s performance, will undermine your livelihood sooner than you might think.

Business planning is also about looking beyond the confines of what your business is doing. What about your competitors? What about your customers? What about the social and business trends? What might be the next big thing in your sector?

I know it’s a cliché to talk about the danger of writing a business plan and putting it on the shelf or in a file on your computer and never looking at it again until you do the same thing the following year, but it really is a good discipline to regularly review your performance against your plan and adjust it, if necessary. It’s your plan after all.

One good way of doing this is to have a more frequent breakdown of sales and costs in, say, a monthly profit and loss forecast and, more crucially, a monthly cash flow forecast. By looking at these numbers on a monthly basis, and against a pre-determined plan, you can get an early warning of any deviation from the plan and adjust your activities accordingly.

Your business plan should also cover investment in your business – when might be the best time to purchase that new piece of kit, or is leasing it actually a better option? Marketing budgets and strategies for finding new customers and telling existing customers about new products is also a vital part of business planning.

This year, as well as writing our one year detailed business plan, we are also developing a five year strategic plan that we are calling our 2020 Vision. This strategic view is broader and less detailed than the one year operational plan, but really sets the framework into which our annual plans can fit, and will ultimately help us on our journey to becoming the sort of company we want to be in five years’ time.

As an organisation, we now employ 90 people and, as well as offering advice, we are a growing business ourselves. We practise what we preach and see the value of having a good business plan that is regularly reviewed to evaluate our success. From sole traders to multi-nationals, this approach applies to companies of all sizes.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, 'if you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail'.