Wrapping up Christmas
December 5, 2019
Everyone in business knows that it is good advice to write a plan. Yet many of us don’t know where to start and quickly get too busy at the beginning of each new year to set aside the time to get anything useful committed to paper, let alone actually implement it.
There are those of us who don’t plan at all, some who write plans and then file them away to collect dust, and others who write a plan and then diligently get everything in order for implementation and measurement. Have you met any of these people? They seem very few and far between.
Your plan does not need to be very technical, highly detailed, 92 pages long or even well formatted and presented. A simple hand written list of key decisions can make a huge difference to your personal and business life and performance.
In fact, I met a business person once who repeatedly denied having a plan and then after an hour of talking pulled three plans off his shelf! None of them had been implemented and they had each cost him consulting fees to get them written. He had been too embarrassed to admit that he had done lots of planning but that the plans had just collected dust.
I must say though that this particular businessman is now very successful and writes himself a one page plan every year which he pins onto the wall next to his desk so that he focuses on the things that matter.
Planning:
- Helps you integrate your online presence with your offline marketing activities.
- Helps you focus on the things that really make a difference.
- Helps you prioritise your activities.
- Helps you to predict change and then respond effectively to it.
- Manages your time and resources more efficiently.
- Provides direction and focus to your staff and your supporters.
- Prevents crises in your business.
- Means you spend less time fighting fires.
- Gets you ahead of the game and ahead of your competition.
8 Steps to Successful Planning
Having a plan is one thing but it is completely useless and a waste of time if you do not put it into action. Statistics say 90% of strategy fails because of poor execution.
There are several little things you can do to make it easier to put your plan into practice:
- Ask a trusted adviser to help you build your plan and to make you accountable for its implementation. Use your adviser as a sounding board and to help remove roadblocks along the way, but don’t give them the whole job.
- If you work with someone on your plan, make sure you do your share. Do the thinking yourself, do your own research and own the decisions you make. You need to OWN this plan, you need to know it, and you need to have complete buy in.
- Have a copy of your plan tucked away in your bag or on your smartphone and add to it all the time. Scribble on it with notes of progress, make comments, add ideas etc. Keep it fresh and alive.
- Break it into achievable chunks, weekly goals, daily actions or whatever helps you to always be moving in the right direction.
- Review progress often and record progress on your plan.
- Share your plan with others – your staff, your family, your advisers – and be accountable to each other. Be mindful however that a good plan contains confidential information that would be very useful to your competitors. Keep it safe.
- Build it into your weekly/fortnightly team meetings and if you do not have regular team meetings in your company then make this one of the first things you commit to doing this year. If the response is “We are never all together,” then make it a rule that the team meeting goes ahead each week/ fortnight at a set time regardless of how many team members are available. Make it a priority.
- Each week ask yourself and your team “What is the one thing you can do this week to drive this business toward our goals?”
“The best preparation for good work tomorrow, is to do good work today.”
– Elbert Hubbard
Get started now with a free business planning template. Email hannah@synthesis.co.nz for a copy.
Or, simply contact us today for marketing coaching and get started right away on your marketing plan.
