The late, longtime BYU football coach, Lavell Edwards, speaking of his upcoming football season, was passionate about planning. He said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
This principle is one hundred percent true in life and especially in business. It’s shocking how many business owners I work with fail to operate on predetermined goals and plans of action to attain them. It is more a “shoot from the hip and hope for the best” strategy.
As I am sure you know, at the speed of business operation and life in this day and age, shooting from the hip in the short and long run actually ends up resulting in shooting ourselves in the foot! Hope is not a recognized planning strategy in any circle of life. In fact it’s the opposite of planning. It’s the result that we are left with in the absence of a plan. After years of observing thousands of businesses in multiple industries, let me save you a lot of frustration and valuable time and tell you that this process of business management simply does not work for long term success.
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Planning in advance and charting your course will predict your successful outcome just like no plan will predict long term struggle and ultimate failure. In personal life or business, those who plan create desired results in volume and speed 10-15x greater and faster compared to those individuals who try to randomly multi-task their way to the top.
I chose this topic for November because when it comes to creating your operational business plan November is a perfect time to begin this process for the coming year. At this point if you have been tracking revenue, profit, expenses, and production metrics you should have enough historical data to make some reasonable financial forecasts for the new year.
In the building industry, the most utilized on-the-job documents are the blueprints. A contractor would never engage in a build project and make financial commitments based on general ideas of the scope of a project. We would be playing a guessing game with valuable resources and ultimately both the contractor and the property owner would be frustrated and disappointed with the outcome. However, ironically, most business owners I talk to are okay leaving their livelihood up to chance and hope in the absence of a basic operational business plan.
Business planning is one of the most valuable yet underutilized tools for performance and accountability. Predicting next year’s outcome starts today! Get ahead of the curve and hit the ground running for a record year in 2019!
Don’t make the mistake of starting to build your plan on Jan 1st. You will lose the first 4-6 weeks of your year if you start when the clock is already rolling!
If you are struggling in this area, give us a call and I will be happy to take a look at your planning processes and forecasting with you and give you support to get you on the fast track!
To set an appointment call us at 801-349-1129 or email us at admin@ppmanagement.com.
Chad Harward – CEO
Pinpoint Management