Chuck Bowen was a successful business planner in his corporate jobs, rising the ladder to become a CEO. He worked with start-up companies for about six years where he had to do strategic plans in order to get funding, go public, or complete mergers.
After doing a lot of them, he began laughing at the silliness of it all. Once the planning was done, what was left that would actually be used to do the work? He realized that the key to success relied more heavily on what happens AFTER you get the funding and have to do the work.
When he left the corporate world to start his own coaching business, he realized that it helps to think through (out loud and written down) what someone wants their business to be. Most clients seemed to be anti-planning—they weren’t thinking forward, strategizing, or even being thoughtful about what they wanted.
And no wonder. Too many planning templates and examples are too long (multiple pages of contents and hundreds of pages long). Military war plans may need to sit in binders on shelves for every possible contingency, but that’s not what is needed for small businesses.
Most people are not natural planners. A tool was needed, and Chuck combined several things to come up with the SSP. It includes the things a business needs but it’s set up in a way that small business owners can understand…so they can act when it’s time to act.