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Planning? Please, anything but that! - Jun 18, 2010

Posted by: Gary Lee in Articles

What is it about planning that brings such dread to mind? No doubt many of us have been involved in planning before, so we have memories of the experience, some good, some not so good.

A popular business proverb is “failing to plan is planning to fail”. Do an Internet search on that phrase and you get 24,700,000 hits! That means a good number of people have heard that proverb before and have something to say about it. So what?

Those of us that have been involved in strategic planning in business have many stories we could tell. Sometimes planning is borne out by the results, sometimes not. If the planning is simply done so someone can say the company has a plan it will fall into the “sometimes not” category. What a waste, some would say. We tried it once and it didn’t work. We can’t predict the future so why try?

Well, we do it because studies of businesses over time bear out the fact that those that are actively engaged in careful planning perform better than those that aren’t. Hence the proverb.

Unfortunately, the majority of businesses don’t have a strategic plan in place. They may have written a business plan to obtain a loan, perhaps an SBA loan, and that was the last time anyone gave planning much thought. It is unlikely a strategic plan spelling out the details of how the company would accomplish that plan was ever written. If having one is so important, why doesn’t it get done? It seems that business owners simply don’t know where to begin and may feel they don't have time to develop one. They want to get the business underway and think they can handle things as they come up.

Alan Lakein, author of books on time management, said “Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now”. He was talking about this in the context of someone’s personal life, but for owners of a small to medium-sized business, the line between personal and company goals can be a blur, so I believe what he said is important for both.

Personally, do we plan what to do for a given day after the day’s end? Of course we don’t. At the start of the day we know what we want to accomplish for that day. When an entrepreneur starts a company, it is imperative to have an end-game in mind ahead of time as well. Is the purpose of a business to provide a living for a period of time? Is it to build something of value to sell or perhaps pass on to a subsequent generation when the time is right? Whatever the end goal, the planning needs to be done before a business opens its doors. If not, there is no better time than right now to start planning for the future. That’s true from business or individual perspectives. A successful strategy requires that business owners be fully engaged in the process of setting short, medium and long-term goals. Reducing goals to writing AND then detailing the steps for achieving those goals in the strategic plan helps owners and their staff focus on how to manage the company. Once a plan it is developed, it must be periodically updated to be effective. Otherwise it will simply be a paperweight gathering dust next to other long-forgotten objects.

Your B2B CFO^® partner can help developb or update your strategic plan.