Please take a few minutes to think about these two questions:

1) What are our company's three most important opportunities?
2) What are our company's three biggest issues or threats?

If your company is successful in taking advantage of its most important opportunities and eradicates its biggest threats in 2010, it will move your company to an entirely new level of profitability, growth and financial strength.  If instead you work on lots of other less important goals and spend your staff time fighting fires, your company may be little better off than it is today and will have wasted a year of its history.

To achieve these goals, you must:

1) Properly identify the most important (3-5) opportunities and risks.

2) Develop detailed action plans to successfully tackle them.

3) Execute these plans effectively.

Don't waste time.  Begin planning for 2010.  If you don't have a strong planning team in-house, I recommend bringing in a good outside facilitator to help you.  There are some great ones in Madison, including www.3GoodQuestions.com where I am on the planning team.