I Hear Following Your Business Plan is Important…

May 27th, 2009 • Comments Planning

Recently, I’ve been involved in doing a lot of business planning, due to a merger of forces that I was involved in. (More on that in the near future.) It’s been a really interesting exercise to be involved in, taking both conventional and unconventional paths with it, and soliciting people’s advice on what it is that I should be doing. This certainly isn’t the first business I’ve started, or had to plan for, so I’d like to think I’ve got some idea of what to do. That said, one of the best parts of this process was putting together the business plan and goals for revenue targets, and what we’d like our growth to be.

And that got me thinking. Watching friends, acquaintances, strangers, and even enemies build and run companies in the past and present has allowed me to see successes, failures, and those that live in that grey area between success and failure. There does seem to be a commonality that exists between the failures: either their business plan wasn’t solid in the first place, or they moved away from what it is they were supposed to be doing.

Defining the core functions of your business is an integral part of that business, as is ensuring that you aren’t getting away from these core functions – at least, not without solid reasons. If you are moving away from them, that means you should be asking yourself whether these changes will make your business MORE successful. If you’re making changes that will cause your business to remain stagnant, (or even worse, become less successful), why are you doing them? It seems like an obvious question, but it’s one that I don’t see asked enough, it seems – at least in my network of people.

In order to track your success and whether change is necessary, establishing success metrics is important. That’s my current task; I’ll offer more thoughts on this later. Otherwise, remember: planning exists for a reason. If you’re not going to follow your plan, you wasted your time doing it in the first place – and are likely wasting your time doing whatever it is you’re doing instead.

Those are my (pretty simple) thoughts; what do you think?