I once submitted a full, unsolicited business plan to my executive director.
At the risk of losing the hours I invested into it (and maybe a raised eyebrow and “what are you doing here?”), I had a strategic initiative I believed in and understood that the right way for someone in my position to advocate for it was to make the case in writing, with numbers, with a clear articulation of what the organization would gain, and what it would require.
Submitting a business plan from a non-executive role signals something about how you understand your own position. It signals that you see your role as contributing to organizational direction, not just executing against it.
This was the most professional/polished version of something I pride myself in doing a lot — identifying needs and working on not just a solution, but a sustainable, meaningful one. I can’t help myself. It’s my way of manifesting the question that often casually floats around associations (or anything really): how can we be better?
I get it; not everyone approaches their role this way. Honestly, I’m not sure everyone should because some folks are better at execution once a plan is in place vs. coming up with the actual plan.
What a Business Plan Is Not
A business plan is not a proposal. A proposal asks for something. Instead, a business plan makes a case for something — and while both are important at different times, there’s certainly a marked difference in the intellectual work required to produce each.
A proposal can be written from the perspective of what the requester wants. A business plan has to be written from the perspective of the decision-maker — what do they need to know, what objections will they have, what does success look like in terms they care about, and what are the honest risks of moving forward.
Writing a business plan requires you to steelman the opposition to your own idea before you’ve made the case for it. That’s harder than it sounds, especially when you believe in what you’re proposing.
It also requires a level of organizational intelligence that pure functional expertise doesn’t automatically produce. To make a case that a communications investment will drive membership retention, you have to understand how the organization thinks about retention, what the current numbers look like, where the gaps are, and why your proposed approach addresses the actual gap rather than a adjacent one. That requires knowing the organization well enough to translate your work into its priorities — not your own.
Why This Matters for Leadership Development
The business-plan writing exercise produced something beyond the plan itself: a clearer understanding of how the organization actually makes decisions, where the real priorities live versus where they’re stated, and what the leadership team is most likely to fund versus what they’re most likely to defer.
That clearer understanding might be available in other ways, but this is, in my experience, a concrete one if done correctly. You can sit in staff meetings and read strategic plans and review budgets and still not know how an organization actually decides things until you’ve tried to move it toward something it hadn’t already decided to do. The business plan is the test. The response to it — what questions get asked, what concerns surface, what the path to yes or no looks like — is one of the most useful data sets a senior staff member can have.
I’m not suggesting everyone should be submitting unsolicited business plans to their executive directors. The culture has to support it, the relationship has to be there, and, probably most importantly, the idea has to be genuinely worth the ask. If any of those conditions aren’t present, the exercise produces friction rather than value. That caveat should be respected and handled with care.
What It Signals
Beyond the specific initiative, submitting a business plan from a non-executive role signals something about how you understand your own position. It signals that you see your role as contributing to organizational direction, not just executing against it. It signals that you’re willing to do the intellectual work of making a case rather than assuming your position entitles you to a hearing.
And it signals that you’re comfortable with the possibility of being told no — because you’ve done the work to understand what yes would require.
(That combination of organizational investment and intellectual honesty is, I think, one of the cleaner signals of executive readiness available to a senior staff member who doesn’t yet have an executive title. It’s not the only signal, but it’s one that’s hard to fake and hard to miss.)
What Happens Next
Real-time talk: As of today, I don’t know yet what will happen with the recent plan I submitted. but again, that’s not the most important part with regard to this.
What I know from previous experience is that the personal value of the exercise rarely lives entirely in the outcome. It lives in the clarity the process produces about the idea, about the organization, and about your own thinking.
Accepted or not, you did the work and grew from the process. That part doesn’t depend on the answer.
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