Planning is a vital ingredient for success. It gives you clarity and focus and makes you much more organised as you go after the dreams you set out to achieve. For this reason, every small business owner needs to take a few hours out of their day this January to plan for next year.
It isn’t just about jotting down dates; it’s about gaining laser-sharp focus and turning chaos into well-behaved order. Proper planning lets you easily track your progress, adjust accordingly, and succeed.
I read the other day that 49 out of 50 businesses are started without a business plan.
I was shocked…
Having done a business degree, all my early businesses had detailed business plans that ran to pages and pages of text with charts, numbers, projections and plans. It didn’t matter how much effort was put into them; they always ended up in a draw and were largely forgotten about.
Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Dwight D Eisenhower said planning is futile, but the act of planning is indispensable.
They meant that the moment you start acting on your plan, the battlefield changes, and your competitors and customers don’t read it.
So Why Plan?
Here’s the thing about planning…
For every minute you spend doing it, you’ll save at least 10 minutes in implementation. While planning won’t guarantee a result, it will give you clarity and focus, arguably the two most important determinants between success and failure.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, two of the most successful people on the planet, were once asked what they thought the #1 attribute of success was. Both agreed that the key to success was the ability to focus on the task at hand without distraction.
Spending time on planning and strategy helps you spend more time in what Steven Covey calls Quadrant 2—the important but non-urgent stuff that is the hangout of the highly successful person.
I no longer condone mammoth business plans (unless you’re chasing funding or a sale). A relatively simple document is enough to help people get some clarity and focus is usually more than enough.
What Should I Plan?
As someone who passionately believes in business and life balance, I endorse people setting goals for an epic lifestyle. I also passionately believe that we should all have bucket lists and dream boards and actively work to tick things off.
But with that being said, I want to introduce you to the Circle of Life. I use a simple life coaching tool with my clients to ensure they work towards a balanced life.
Essentially, it’s a spider graph with eight quadrants; each quadrant has a title, such as business, relationships, health, spirituality, or fun.
Each axis has the numbers 1 -10 up the side, and for each, you score your life in each area out of ten and then join up the dots. If we live a perfectly balanced life, we’ll have a large circle. You can download our Circle of Life template here.
Whether you do the circle of life or not, when I’m working week to week with my clients, I encourage them to work on 5 goals – Health – Relationships – Personal Development and then 2 business-related goals.
How Do I Plan?
I encourage my 121 clients to do five sets of planning each year.
First, we concentrate on their longer-term dreams, goals, and aspirations for their lives and businesses. We take time to look at 5-year goals and 1-year goals in isolation. After completing the longer-term plans, we spend time planning the next 90 days’ activity every quarter.
When creating any plan, it’s important to focus on three specific areas. We always start with goals. After we get clear on our goals, we think about the various things we need to do to hit those goals. Finally, we look at key performance indicators. I’ll break them all down in more detail below.
Goal Plan
We start with goals; as I said earlier, I encourage my clients to work on five goals in each 90-day period. Health, relationships, personal development and two business goals. The key to good goal setting is complete clarity. To achieve this, you must decide what you want and then really specifically write it down. I’m sure you have used the SMARTER method for goal-setting builders. It’s an oldie but a goodie, which I use. For each goal, I also encourage people to think about WHY they want it, what may get in their way and how they could overcome it.
Action Plan
Once you have crystal clear goals penned down, the next step is to take some time and think about literally everything that you need to do in order to achieve the goal. The more comprehensive the list, the more likely you’ll be to achieve the goal. Once you’ve thought about every action that needs to happen, you need to sort them by priority and sequence. For instance, some things will naturally need to come before others, and some things will be more important. In my opinion, the action part is probably the part that gets overlooked the most, but it’s perhaps the most crucial part (it’s the plan).
KPI’S
Ok, you’ve got a dream, set some goals, and created a plan, but if you want to achieve it, it’s not enough to leave it there. It would help if you put some key performance indicators for yourself. Setting KPI’s in my experience is something that most small business owners struggle with, it’s a case of not knowing what to track, how to get started but the reality is it’s a process that with a little bit of discipline and consistency will supercharge your results.
There are two types of numbers that you should be reviewing in your business:
Lead indicators—These KPIs help you monitor the activity you need to do to win the business, such as the number of calls, meetings, and proposals.
Lag indicators—These KPIs help you measure the actual result, such as the number of new clients or money invoiced.
Measure and Refocus
We encourage you to monitor your progress, track your KPIs, refocus on your goals, and plan for the week ahead—every single week. The more that you can gamify the process, the better your success will be. Just remember: We are what we repeatedly do. Success, then, is not an act but a habit.
I hope this little guide helps you create a killer plan for 2024.
As always, if you need any help, you know where I am.
Onwards and upwards, my friend.
Px
