To plan or not to plan?

The statistics on new venture success rates are not encouraging to the new venture developer.  Conventional wisdom gives us a 50-50 shot while even more pessimistic figures are routinely published.  Pick up any “Business 101” text and one of the first pieces of advice it’ll give you is: “Make a Five Year Business Plan”.  And yet, and yet . . . even MBA’s from renowned institutions with puh-lenty of business experience, people who really ought to have known better, people who have been professional corporate planners . . . have tried to start businesses without a plan.  Tried, and failed (or rather just never moved beyond the survival level) .   Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything, heh, heh.

 

Writing a business plan, and rewriting it every month has been a profound experience for me and has taken my businesses, and my business concept to a level I never expected when I started the process.  So why did I ever try a business without one? 

Typical internal protests included:

• But the business is just me; and I can manage myself.

• But I have no idea what the costs or revenues will be, so how can I make a projection?

• But I’m not looking for any funding.

• But all this Vision and Mission stuff is so airy fairy, it doesn’t change the bottom line (said with an extra dose of sarcasm and ignoring the fact that large and successful corporations spend millions each year on defining and communicating Vision and Mission).

and the all time favorite:

• But I don’t have time to do a plan, I’m too busy, I need to get____done today.

 

An astute observer – like you – will notice that all those protests began with the word “But”,  a sure sign to anyone with even a slightly evolved personal development kind of consciousness, that they are all fictitious beliefs.

 

I think the main problem for me, and others is that people view “the plan” as a final product – a static document.  If there are deviations, which there always will be in any healthy business, they use the document to feel failure instead of success.  Who wants to spend time on a document that stays in a drawer until it’s time to feel crappy and beat yourself up?

 

I learned instead to use the plan as a dynamic document, constantly revising it as circumstances change, so it became a focusing tool.  The process I developed, uses a postable cover page where you can clarify your intention to the point where Good Things Start to Happen.  The Universe, God, the Force, the Market, whatever you want to call the Powers that Be respond to clear intentions.  By thinking through a strategy, you can line up all the dominoes of your business tools (e.g. your marketing message, sales process, your administration system and most importantly your team), much more easily and make difficult investment decisions, because you know what result you are intending.

 

Not sure how to get started?  Click on the blogroll link to Artemis Consulting Partners – we have not only described exactly what to do, we have also provided you with a free business plan template.