Planning increases the likelihood of an entrepreneur actually starting their business by 260%; however, your plan will fail without one key element: execution. Planning and execution must run in tandem, striking the perfect balance to find:
- Growth
- Success
- Business maturity
Your early days as an entrepreneur are filled with excitement and vision. But when plans fail or roadblocks get in the way, that’s when you’ll be at a crossroads of either pushing forward or failing.
Here’s what it takes have success in the business world.
Business Growth Starts with a Flexible Plan
Your business fills a void. Clients may need accounting services, dog owners need beds, apartment complexes need cleaning – you’re solving a pain point.
Starting and running a business takes a lot of work, but every decision you make should move you closer to your goals.
If you don’t know what your goals are, ask yourself a few questions:
- Who will (if you haven’t opened) or does your business help? Break these down into personas, like this.
- Are you different from your competitors? What makes you different?
- Why would a customer or client choose you and your business over another? Be honest and raw because this is serious.
- Where do you hope your business will be in the next year? Three years? Five years?
And this last point is so important because it allows you to model your future based on your goals. If you want to make $5 million in five years, then you’ll need to plan out:
- Products and services
- Revenue goals
- Profit margins to reach your goals
Let’s assume you need to sell 50,000 products at $100 each to hit your goal (you can do the same with client services). You need to think further. How will you market your products? Where will you market your products? What capital do you need to hit your goals?
Break down goals into milestones that each have mini plans.
We’re going to bet that your business will need more employees, warehouse space, marketing, and/or managers to reach $5 million.
Plan ahead for these important moments, but don’t forget that even the best plan fails without execution.
Symbiosis Between Planning and Execution
You’ve done it. You have a plan, ideas, goals, and milestones to hit. But here’s the problem, and it’s something we see a lot of owners face while trying to make their ideas a reality:
- Half of owners get stuck in the “plan.” They get stuck in paralysis by analysis, revisiting their plans, making sure everything is perfect and before they ever execute, they’ve found something else to change up.
- Half of owners will bypass or shortcut creating a plan and jump right in. These owners like getting their hands dirty, but most make critical mistakes that end up eroding their initial capital.
Success stories on both of these extremes happen (once in a while), but there’s too much left to chance. Plans and execution create the beneficial symbiosis necessary for success.
You just need to strike the right balance between the two.
We’ve seen it time and time again with owners who lean too heavily on planning or execution. They have great ideas. But reaching their goals is challenging.
Execution without Planning Lacks a Destination
Focusing on execution makes you an underdog. You have the grit for business and to get your hands dirty, but where’s your destination?
You’re in the driver’s seat with no direction or map for success.
Executionists tend to:
- Jump around based on the issue of the day
- Make reactive, stressful decisions
- Keep moving forward with no context
A long-term perspective helps you understand what’s the best fit for the future, not just the moment.
Planning brings everything into perspective, giving your decisions direction, consistency, and increasing the odds of making the right choices.
But there’s also the flipside to consider: overplanning.
Overplanning Rarely Leads to Taking a Leap
Making a plan is a fundamental step in reaching your goal. But there’s a fine line between planning and overplanning.
A lot of people have great ideas, but they spend months and months planning without executing. It’s called paralysis by analysis.
Often, you have to take a leap or make a decision because:
- Plans rarely feel perfect due to the unknowns
- Often, the timing often never feels quite right
Planning (or rather, overplanning) has a way of causing you to have paralysis; existing in a place where you’re frozen and stuck without taking action.
What we see happen is that when a planner finally feels like they have addressed the last piece, they realize other elements of the plan are now outdated, and they go back to change things yet again.
If there is always a reason why now is not the right time to own a business, you’re also overplanning.
Here’s what you want to do:
- Focus on the big picture view
- Get the idea out
- THEN get to the details
Why? You can be sure things will change in the first six months, so there’s no better time than now to take the dive. We can almost guarantee that in the first year not everything will go exactly according to plan, customers will come and go, trucks will break down, and your plan will look different than before.
Make Yourself Accountable or Risk FTI Disease
A plan is great, but you need to implement it. We’ve seen a lot of great business ideas fail from what we call FTI disease, or failing to implement disease.
Planning requires determining a course of action and expected results.
However, there’s a saying I love: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Unfortunately, plans rarely (if ever) go perfectly according to plan. As such, lpans also require:
- Monitoring
- Assessing
- Modifying
All of these elements require you to hold yourself accountable. Don’t fall into the mindset that being accountable is only good for everyone else and not yourself.
Tiger Woods is a good example of this.
He was dominating the world of golf. No one in the world was better than him at the time. So, how did he stay accountable? He had a golf coach. The best player on the planet had someone to help and work with him.
Egos are traps that allow you to be lax on accountability.
It takes humility to bring in other people and listen to their perspectives, but this is the ultimate form of accountability.
The Takeaway
As a business owner, you now know that planning and execution require a fine balance to help you reach your goals. If you find yourself stuck in either stage or procrastinating for some reason instead of taking action, it’s time to hold yourself accountable.
Your success is on the other side of accountability.
Schedule an appointment if you want to learn more about growing your business or need help staying accountable.