Fail to plan, plan to fail.

You know the saying ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’. It’s true. And right now, there isn’t a better time to plan for you the future you want from your business.

Planning is fundamental to the process for knowing where you need to go. Planning helps to clarify your vision, your purpose and highlights whether you have the available skills, time or resources to complete your plan. A lack of a coherent plan often leads to confusion; it makes business owners follow the next shiny thing, which then causes them to deviate from their own plan.

Action Coach David Rivers uses the analogy of a using a Sat Nav to describe the planning process. Business Owners are able to choose their destination, whether that is for this year, next year or in five years, they can press ‘start’ and then Sat Nav plots a route back to their starting point and advises them to turn left, turn right or go straight on, in order to reach the desired destination.

Planning after Covid
Prior to lockdown 1.0 we helped create a number of very robust business plans, then Covid hit and a lot of them were torn up and thrown out!

While the business world has always evolved, Covid-19 has become the accelerator for one of the greatest workplace transformations in generations. How we work, exercise, shop, learn and communicate has changed forever.

Over the last 12 months business owners have seen more rapid change than ever before, which means we are entering another period of uncertainty and 90% of the previous ‘normal’ may now be totally different.

Change is inevitable and the challenge will be to pick a path, create a robust plan and stick to it. A 90-day plan can give you clarity on your goals, what you need to change and highlights what unnecessary distractions you need to filter out to provide a structure for where you want to go.

What’s included in a good plan?
A good plan will help business owners to develop the necessary mindset for setting a clear plan, accepting change where it’s needed and sticking to their original purpose.

A good plan will focus on:

• Having a clear vision for what business owners want to achieve
• Identifying whether they have the skills to achieve it
• Highlight the resource needed for delivering objectives
• Giving them the motivation for what needs to be done
• Creating a plan to execute

If you don’t have all of these in place it can lead to a lot of anxiety and frustration.

Your plan should also answer the Have, Do, Be questions. As a business owner what do you want to HAVE from your business? What do you need to DO to get there? And in order to succeed, what sort of person do you need to BE?

“The importance of planning is the process you go through, not the document you end up with”

The process of making a plan allows you to understand what you can influence and what you can’t.  But it can also be a good Kick Up The Ar$e (KUTA) time.

Reality check, you can measure the life you have left in minutes and days! You have limited time to have an impact so even less time to waste procrastinating.

How will you use you time? Planning for the next 90 days can be the blueprint for the next 1-5 years

Remember, the importance of planning is the process you go through, not the document you end up with.