I was taught early on in my career to put my business plan to paper. In the past, this annual plan may have been created so I could better manage the department(s) I was responsible for overseeing. From these annual internal business plans, I could monitor, measure, and correct course on a quarterly basis. Later on, my annual initiative would help and guide me in managing regional offices and, eventually, my own company. This process served me well managing an engineering group, a design-build company, and its estimating and service departments.

So, even though we are in the final month of 2025, it is not too late to draft your business plan based on your company or based on a department(s) within the firm that you work for. Assuming this hasn’t been done for 2025, you will find the first year’s plan can be challenging and time-consuming because the following database categories were not organized to begin this business plan process in the past:

• Last year’s sales volume in dollars
• Last year’s revenue (operating cost and profit)
• Volume, revenue, and profit by last year’s business categories, i.e., healthcare, commercial, etc.
• Current backlog
• This year’s proposed sales volume
• This year’s targeted revenues and associated profits

The accounting department will play an important role in providing the information needed to create the 2026 Plan by going back and sorting the data needed into categories. It’s important to sort by profit centers so you can place these services in an order that will show which service volumes are ready to grow, and which services may be deficient in closing sales and/or making a reasonable profit margin. I’ve seen upper management want to increase growth and profits in each category without acknowledging that one or more of these profit centers hadn’t met 2025 expectations. So why would a company simply indicate it will increase sales (i.e., a 15% goal) while ignoring certain services that were not sufficiently profitable in 2025? I’ve included a summary recap to the business plan exercise that I have used each year. See Figure 1, “Sample Annual Business Plan-Sales for Year 2026,” a template example for consulting services, but applicable for other HVAC services.

To get buy-in from individuals within a group(s), it’s important to delegate responsibilities to a select few who will be responsible for maintaining their portion of this spreadsheet and reporting quarterly on the progress of the Business Plan. I also like to include an “assigned secondary group individual” as part of their own training from the “assigned group individual” mentor.

The “budgeted” and “actual” columns will identify early on whether the profit center projects are on track to finish the year as envisioned. Also, sharing this spreadsheet with the accounting department will educate that group as to what your group’s needs are throughout the year. With the pre-agreed accounts’ monthly data being produced, the quarterly report for each assigned group leader’s accounts can be produced in a timely manner.

A side benefit to this Business Plan will be that the sales volume, revenues, and profit information will allow the group or company to make a reasonable judgment about when the profit centers could grow and possibly expand, as well as possibly phase out a non-productive service while also considering introducing new profit centers – i.e., becoming proficient in “facility assessment of infrastructure” services that would complement current central plant replacements and expansions.

With good documentation in year 2026, revisiting the Business Plan for year 2027 will take far less time to develop and be more useful based on lessons learned.