Do you have a business plan, or are you formulating a start-up without having a business plan? Before you do, you should remember:
You fail to plan, You plan to fail! (Business plan)
There are some business owners who do write plants, only for them to stay in one place and become useless, as they do not even look at them. Do not become like them!
What should you do? You should draft the idea you have and work on it until you know what you will need and use it as a guide for your business.
When you create a business plan or work on it, it does not mean you can not operate your business. You can operate your business and work on our business plan as you go along because a business plan gets modified and revised as your business develops and increases. The fact is, no project is guaranteed unless it gets executed. Therefore, here are the next steps.
Do not become one of those people who create a plan but do not execute it.
Save Your Time & Money With a Good Plan
Remember your plan does not have to be 100 pages long, technical and comprehensive, or well-formatted. We recommend you keep a simple list, which can even be handwritten, with all the important decisions you need to take that will influence your business and personal life and performance.
How ‘Planning’ Helps?
- It allows you to focus on things that will actually make a difference on things that matter.
- You can prioritize your actions accordingly.
- You can predict any modification or change happening and respond efficiently.
- It helps you manage time and all resources more efficiently.
- Your staff and support will get the direction and concentration they need.
- Your business can avoid any crisis falling on to it, meaning you spend less time fighting unnecessary fires.
- It will help you stay on top of your game and competition.
When you have a good plan on hand, you can be free from unnecessary work, allowing you to work much smarter and concentrate on things that matter and will make a difference for your business and customers. In simpler words, you get more time to bring people together and get them to work better and achieve better performance and efficiency.
In addition to that, you have better control over your and everyone’s action around you. A good business plan consists of significant small business decisions you can look at when you manage your business. A good plan informs you what you have to do and what you should avoid doing. It gives you boundaries and guidelines for managing and enhancing your business.
Lastly, a good plan will be flexible. Why? Because we all know that in a business, changes happen faster than you blink, and the aim is to not get left behind. Businesses face new chances and opportunities all the time, and you have a small time window in which you have to consider and respond to them.
How To Respond To Change?
Charles Darwin said:
“It’s not the strongest who survive
Nor the most intelligent
But the ones most responsive to change.”
When he said that, he was probably thinking about a plant or an animal species. Nonetheless, Darwin could also easily be referring to businesses and their owners!
Your business plan will not stay the same; it will modify and change as your business and the industry you are in change and develop. You could purchase a business, but you will still need to create your own plan.
You will face a lot of tests regarding various things like learning, technologies, meeting new people and even the market will change. Therefore, not all the time will your decisions be perfect, and if they are not, you do not have to worry. You should continually review and update your plan as you go along.
Breathe A Little Life Into Your Plan
When you have a plan, it is useless and a time waste if you do not implement it. According to the statistics, around 90% of strategies fail because plans were not implemented or executed properly.
Here are a few actions you can take to ensure your plan gets implemented easily:
- Get a trusted advisor to assist you in creating your business plan and hold you accountable for implementing it. An advisor should become your sounding board and assist you when any roadblocks come your way. However, do not completely give them the job.
- When you are not alone in planning, ensure you do your work and not leave it on the other person. Think for yourself, ensure you do your analysis and make your own decisions. You have to own your plan, know it and ensure you have total buy-in.
- Have a plan of the copy on you at all times, whether it’s in your bag or saved on your device, as it allows you to review and revise any time you want to. Add comments, ideas, and notes to our plan to keep it active and fresh.
- Divide your plan into achievable sections, like a weekly goal, daily actions, or anything that will assist you in ensuring you move in the right direction.
- Always review and record the progress of your plan as you go along and as much as you can.
- Share your plan with others like your employees, family, friends, advisors. However, remember to keep confidential data and other useful information safe so that it does not get into the hands of your competitors.
- Create weekly or fortnightly team meetings with your team in your business, a goal you need to do. Make it a priority to ensure everyone in the company gets involved and included in your meetings, making it the most important rule in your business.
- Every week, you should ask your employees and yourself the main question: What is the one thing that can get done this week to get your business to the goals you want to achieve?
As Elbert Hubbard Says:
The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today
No matter what your business looks like right now, start planning what you need to do or should do for the next year.
You will have to take time out of your busy business schedule to work on a business plan. When you work on a business, instead of working in it, you can achieve much more.