No Plan, No Direction, No Success
June 11th, 2012 by Diane Conklin under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Many entrepreneurs think of themselves as spontaneous people. Get an idea, act on it, and it will automatically become an overnight success. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually happen that way. And, it probably won’t happen that way for you.
Despite what you may have heard, most “overnight successes” took a lot of hard work and planning. As a matter of fact, most of the “overnight successes” you and I hear about are only overnight to you and me. The marketer/entrepreneur/business person knows their success was anything but overnight.
It takes planning, implementing, execution, working, re-working, revising plans, and a lot more, to get to the point of massive success. These are not traits most of us entrepreneurial types are particularly good at.
As the business owner and leader, you either have to get better at these skills, if you aren’t already good at them; or, you need to surround yourself with people who excel in these areas, who understand your type of business and who are willing to work with you to continue to grow your business.
A mentor of mine says that most entrepreneurs and business owners make the mistake of trying to strengthen their weaknesses when they should be strengthening their strengths. It’s really true. Most of the time, it makes more sense to hire the skills we don’t like to do and aren’t good at than it does to frustrate ourselves and work really hard at something we aren’t naturally good at. It’s cheaper, and healthier, in the end to surround ourselves with good people rather than trying to get good at every skill in our business.
If you don’t have a plan for what you’re going to do this year in your business, how will you get there? And if you don’t have the plan and the vision, who will?
You may have the vision, but have you shared it with your key people? If you haven’t (and I bet you haven’t) then how can they utilize their skills and talents to help you grow? The answer is they can’t, because they have no destination. They’re simply doing the day-to-day, getting by, until you sit down with them and at least go over your plan.
Almost every day, I hear marketers say one of their main problems is getting things executed in their businesses. They have all the ideas and they know what to do, they just can’t seem to get it all executed. Part of the reason this happens is there aren’t plans and business systems in place so everyone knows what they are supposed to do, when they are supposed to do it, and how they are supposed to do it.
Most of us don’t recognize it, but planning is how you get prepared to execute more. With a plan and systems in place, the execution of your business and projects in your business happen more easily, you make more money in the process, and everybody has more fun.
