Run Your Business with a Strategic Plan

The global sales market, your own presence, office, or magazine on the Internet that operates around-the-clock.  Develop a strategic plan which you can control from anywhere!

Utilize the Internet

The Internet provides all of us with a lot of opportunities:

  1. A colossal sales market that includes the entire planet;
  2. Completion of transactions in mere minutes, even though your business partner may be located over a thousand kilometers from you;
  3. Your own presence, office, or magazine on the Internet that operates around-the-clock, automatically; which you can control from anywhere in the world – even while traveling!
  4. The opportunity to play the world’s stock markets, buying shares on the world’s top stock exchanges – all without leaving the comfort of your home.

Three Planning Myths

Are you like 70% of business owners — working without a plan? Here are three myths that need to be dispelled about strategic planning for small business. 

  1. It has to be formal — Not so. The value of a strategic plan for your small business is in putting the ideas on paper, creating action steps that will get you where you want to go and implementing those action steps. 
  2. I’m too small — Not so. Even a one-person business can benefit from a strategic plan. A strategic plan can help you make decisions about time management and budget. Use your strategic plan to help you determine whether to attend an event or advertise in a publication. It’s a check and balance tool. 
  3. A strategic plan is like a ball and chain — Not so. It’s your plan. Too many business owners feel like once it’s on paper, it can’t be changed. Wrong! It should be an active document that gets reviewed and updated at least monthly, if not weekly. You’re the business owner, you wrote it, you know what’s happening in your market — adjust as necessary.

When It Pays To Pause

In each case where a company’s growth rate has the exceeded all planned projections  and forecasts, two things happen:

  1. The growth rate has  threatened the heart beat of the company and
  2. The core competency of management and their support structures was misjudged – that core competency was inadequate.

The lessons are many . The foundation lesson is: when a business starts moving to the next level of performance, management, who has been there already needs to be part of the new picture. When growth accelerates at a fast pace, relying on people and processes who were fine at the previous levels of performance, is using the Dracula Organization Theory Principle.

What is the Dracula Organization? It looks fine during the day but it is sucking the life out  of your business in the night – those periods when you are not able to inspect as closely as you did before. 

You are not likely to agree with everything.  When you don’t – look in the mirror and remind yourself your thinking is wrong. 

 

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