Manchester business planning strategy is not some neat package that consultants sell in seminars. It is the lived reality of a city that has grown through reinvention and hard conversations about what success looks like here and who gets to share in it. Walk the streets near Piccadilly on a weekday and you feel a pulse that is not just economic but strategic, a tension between old industries and new bets on life sciences, digital technology and creative services. This city is not just planning growth it is trying to plan fairness, something that feels almost counterintuitive in business circles yet anchors Manchester’s broader economic strategy.
Plans in Manchester do not begin with spreadsheets. They begin with people and places. The Our Manchester Strategy and the newer economic plans that flow from it are rooted in a kind of intelligence that is broader than balance sheets and profit projections. There is a commitment to jobs that pay fairly and a sincere recognition that past growth has not lifted all boats equally. This is a city with a mayor who will talk as easily about inclusive opportunity as he will about commercial infrastructure, and you hear that reflected in council strategy documents.
In the corridors where business advisors talk about strategy there is less talk about buzzwords and more about resilience and continuity. The city council’s guidance on business continuity planning urges organisations to anticipate disruptions like fire or flood, not because those events happen every day but because the exercise of mapping how you carry on when things go wrong tells you a lot about the robustness of your enterprise. It feels dry on paper yet the underlying logic is tough and humane: survival matters as much as growth.
At a recent small business roundtable I attended in the Northern Quarter, it struck me how regularly people circling around planning sessions mentioned the word ecosystem, as if they were aware that what makes a plan work in Manchester is not a document but the web of relationships behind it. There are growth hubs, consultants offering one to one strategy sessions, and tools for market opportunity analysis that are all part of that ecosystem. But what business owners truly valued was the sense that they were not alone in thinking through their next move.
The city’s economic strategy foregrounds the need to nurture thriving, productive and innovative sectors. There is explicit emphasis on attracting investment into high growth areas like cutting-edge technology and life sciences while also ensuring the physical and digital infrastructure supports these ambitions. Connectivity matters here as much as capital, and not just with rail links and office space but with talent pipelines that bring local residents into jobs with real prospects.
I remember an exchange with a founder of a tech start-up who said that her first proper business plan was written on tram rides between meetings, kind of scribbled into a notebook between cups of coffee. She laughed about it but the point was not lost on anyone listening: strategy for many small firms was not a boardroom exercise but an evolving document shaped by conversations, deadlines, and real world friction. That kind of messy, human planning often felt more honest than the tidy templates you find online.
Knowing where you start and where you want to go might sound obvious but in Manchester that sense of direction is actively forged through deliberate choices about sectors to prioritise and the kinds of support available. The Local Industrial Strategy for Greater Manchester explicitly works to strengthen leadership, improve innovation adoption by local businesses, and raise productivity across sectors. There is even a concerted effort to coordinate support services through a Growth Hub so that firms, whether they are manufacturing challengers or digital pioneers, can find tailored advice and mentoring without feeling lost in the bureaucracy.
In practice a smart plan here might begin with a simple question at a café table: who are my customers and how do they want to be served? That question, however rudimentary, often opens onto a maze of practical issues that define whether a business thrives. Market analysis, as outlined in various planning resources, pushes owners to look beyond their immediate horizons to understand competition, demand trends, and financial projections, elements familiar to any thoughtful planner but grounded here in the lived realities of Manchester’s economy.
But business planning in Manchester is as much about external forces as internal introspection. Regional funds and innovation partnerships are increasingly part of the conversation. Ambitious projects and investment funds totalling hundreds of millions are designed to attract new firms and support existing ones, while also signalling the city’s ambitions to compete globally without losing its local character. These macro moves shape the strategic context for smaller planning cycles that happen in offices and living rooms every day.
The city’s approach to strategy is refreshingly unromantic about competition. It acknowledges that collaboration, especially across sectors and institutions, often yields better outcomes than isolated efforts. Innovation blueprints that seek to align public and private partners underline this idea that strategic vision must be collective if it is to deliver real impact for businesses that are embedded in the city’s social fabric.
There is tension in all this between a plan that is written and one that unfolds in practice. Planning templates and continuity frameworks give structure but cannot replace the hard work of connecting with customers, understanding cash flow, and making weekly decisions that align with longer term goals. What Manchester’s wider strategy does is create a context where those weekly decisions are more informed, more resilient, and more likely to pay off not just for the individual firm but for the broader economy.
