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Starting the New Year with an Outrageous Business Plan

It is difficult to believe that we are already at a point in the year where if you and your team do not have your plans for 2004 complete, it is crunch time! Yes, I knowanother pressure filled thing to do, but imagine the pressure of preparing a business plan for a year that is already started or living another year with a plan! Time is ticking away, and as arduous as planning may seem to many, a written plan is the key to embarking upon the road to personal and professional success.

Now, when we talk about business planning, we do not mean simply uploading last year's plan, updating a few numbers and changing the date. Business planning is about taking a well-rounded look at the big picturewhere your company has been in the past, where it is currently and where you want it to be in the futureand developing a written strategy and plan with specific by-when's for getting there.

Why have a written business plan?

When you write your plan out, it shows you what you do not know about the plan you are writing and provides you with the opportunity to discover the answers, and check out the best plan of action based upon those answers before the plan is set in motion.

Directing a business team without a written and fully understood basis for that direction is like a football coach playing "Eenie, Meanie, Minie, Moe" when choosing between plays A, B, and C just prior to a huddle. Plain luck aside, how can any team be successful with a leader whose direction is unfounded, randomly chosen and full of forks in the road? Yet, this is what business leaders who do not have a full understanding of the plans before them, or even worseno plan at all, are doing; they are randomly selecting a direction without giving full consideration to each and every internal and external variable affecting their business and without a full understanding of the steps involved in going from point A to B.
As a leader, if you do not have a written plan for where your business is going and by-when, you cannot expect your team to know where they are going and by-when.

One thing I'm sure we can all count on is the inability of another to read our minds. Yet the absence of a written plan implies that minds can be read and plans followed without any written gauge of where the team is headed and by-when they need to be there. For any plan to be outrageously successful it must be fully communicated to every person involved in the plan's implementation, and the most efficient and effective means of doing so is to write the plan down!

It has been shown that simply creating a plan or vision in your mind is not enough; in order to create what you picture in your mind, you must write it into your plan. Follow-up research of a study conducted in the 50's of Harvard graduates from the same class, discovered that the 3% who had written goals had accumulated more wealth than the rest of the graduates combined!

If you see yourself and your company as being healthy, happy, and successful, and write it in a plan that keeps you focused, then you and your company will become healthy, happy and successful. If you imagine yourself and your company as failing, and have no written plan for anything else, you will fail. Saying you want success is not enough. You have to truly desire to be successful, focus, write the plan, and then live it. You have to really want what you want, write it down, and be willing to be held accountable for getting it!

An outrageous and profitable 2004 is within your reach. So get moving if there is planning left to do and remember, a well thought out, fully communicated, and implemented written business plan is the key to your company's success.

Clay S. Nelson, the founder of Consulting Services Network LLC, and his team are committed to putting fun, family and financial freedom into everyones business and personal lives. With over two decades of experience coaching business leaders in creating life balance, building teams, and writing plans, their programs are designed to alter the cultures of companies and families. They make a powerful and lasting difference with each person they meet, every group they speak with, and with every client they serve.