Strategic Planning

by Mike DuBose

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail” —Anonymous

There was a time when I thought that a small business did not need a written strategic or business plan. As the business owner and leader, I kept all the plans in my head or locked in my business desk in a secret file for “my eyes only.” After 25 years of inventing, starting, managing, leading, succeeding, and failing in the small business world, I know now that I was WRONG! It is critical that every organization or business has a written, detailed plan for the future: before you sign anything, before you hire your first employee, before you guide your existing business into the future, before you borrow money, and before you decide to move forward with your dream. Before you do any of these things, design your roadmap! As Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”

Do you know where your business is headed and how it will get there? Look at planning a different way. Let’s say you are comfortably seated on an airliner at 20,000 feet in the air and everything is going just right. Suddenly, the pilot announces on the intercom, “Welcome aboard folks! We know that you had your choice of bankrupt airlines to fly and we appreciate you choosing us! I hope you are not hungry because we can’t afford food. The mechanics are on strike because we could not pay their salaries, so we did not get the airplane checked out when we noticed one of the engines leaking fluid. I know you are wondering about that lightning outside. We did not have time to check the weather reports, but pilots in front of us have reported that there are violent thunderstorms with strong wind shears ahead. Oh, by the way, we forgot to pick up your luggage. It just slipped our minds. But don’t worry. You probably won’t need it where we are going (by the way, does anyone know where that is)? That’s assuming we make it at all—we are running low on fuel. So, settle back, relax, and leave the rest to us!”

How would you like to be a passenger aboard that plane? Have you ever worked with an organization that resembled that flight a little bit (or perhaps a lot)? Just think about the amount of planning that goes into just one flight and the teamwork needed to make it safe and successful. Does your company make your employees feel like passengers on that flight? Employees and customers like to work with organizations that have it together.

Why does my business need a strategic plan or roadmap to the future?

Peter Drucker, considered by many to be “the father of modern management,” once said, “Management has no choice but to anticipate the future, to attempt to mold it, and to balance short-range and long-range goals.” Leaders should ask themselves, “What is our business? What will it be? What should it be?” That means not only looking into the future, but also examining your current business to determine the products and services you want to abandon, retain, or reinvent. Management experts like Drucker have noted that risk-taking, though necessary to business, should be informed—that is where the strategic plan comes in. As former President Nixon once commented, “If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you will have no victories.”

A plan is important for several reasons:

It helps the leader(s) and key staff put plans in writing that explain where they want to go as a company and everyone’s role in that journey.
It outlines to all the staff and consultants where the priorities are including the goals, measurable objectives, and activities.
It provides data to the bank or investors so they can understand your business and you can obtain that green stuff that companies need to run on.
It communicates to the team a clear roadmap with checkpoints along the way for measurable validation that they are headed in the right direction, and it serves as a gauge to know when they arrive.
It prepares the company and empowers the employees to steer the ship if the owner or leader becomes disabled or dies.
It makes the organization very effective, efficient, and focused, while promoting teamwork and good communications.

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning enables everyone in an organization to see the step-by-step process that will lead to achieving that organization’s goals and what their responsibilities will be in this process. It also describes the values of the organization’s people, how these values will be used to make decisions, what the company does best, and how the staff and owner see the company operating in the future. It is important to include all staff members in the strategic planning process because the more they feel they have contributed to the plan (the more they “own” it), the harder they will work to support and carry out the plan. Assigning duties under the plan to people who do not feel they have been included in its development can lead to resentment of the plan and (eventually) its failure. Everyone’s opinions should be heard to maximize success.

Creating a strategic plan can appear complicated, but it’s much easier to develop when broken down into simple, understandable terms. Strategic planning is a process which brings everyone together to develop a mutually agreed upon roadmap that:

Provides a clear future vision and purpose.
Explains who we are and who we want to be.
Illustrates how we work with our customers and who they are.
Defines products and services we will provide and our geographical target area.
Depicts our values and work culture.
Outlines where we are going and how to get there.
Documents specific key indicators of accountability so we can measure our progress and know when we arrive.

Drucker noted in his bestseller Management that:

Strategic planning prepares today’s business for the future…It requires an organized process of abandoning yesterday. It requires that the work to be done to produce the desired future be clearly defined and clearly assigned. The aim of strategic planning is action now. (128)

In our companies, we chose to define strategic planning components as follows:

PURPOSE describes our company’s broad reason for being. It is not a specific goal or business strategy. Drucker once said that “the sole purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” Larry Bossidy, author of the bestseller Execution, agreed but edited Drucker’s statement slightly to say “to create a happy customer.” At one time, my business purpose was to generate profit. After all, if you don’t make a profit, you go out of business. However, I believe the most successful business’ purpose is to determine what the customer wants and deliver it when the customer wants it in an outstanding way, exceeding the customers’ expectations. If you can adhere to this purpose in a consistent manner, your chances of being successful are greater. After many years, I have learned that if you truly determine your purpose and then run your business according to the principles outlined in this book, profit should follow. There is more to your purpose, as we will discuss later.

VALUES are what we consider to be important, the way we act and behave towards each other, our clients, and the community, and the way we perform our work.

VISION outlines our ultimate destination – the big picture or dream.

MISSION is a vehicle that takes us to our vision and helps us determine who we are, our targeted audience, our service area, and what we do.

The MANAGEMENT PLAN delegates accountability with goals, measurable objectives, and tasks associated with each objective, who will lead each task, and the date to complete each activity. This component provides the structure needed to get things done!

Another way to look at it….

Let’s put strategic planning into a non-business context. In 2005, I had a vision of traveling overseas to experience Italian culture, relax and spend quality time with my family, get away from my company to rejuvenate myself (both personally and as a business leader), and just have fun! I knew where I wanted to go and the trip had been a dream of mine for more than twenty years. At the same time, I viewed this trip as belonging to my family as well. In order to ensure that everyone agreed with my recommendations, I asked questions, solicited advice, and probed for what their wants and desires were. While visiting the Coliseum in Rome was very important to me, the rest of the family did not place this on their high priority list. So I tried to build ownership and consensus where everyone got something out of the deal.

In order to put legs on my dreams and thoughts, I had to think about the measurable objectives or tasks that I needed to accomplish in order to pull the big picture off – just like I would have to do if I were starting, refining, or growing a business. Some of those travel items were:

Obtaining passports for all family members
Securing airline, train, and hotel reservations
Reviewing several books on the places we planned to visit
Learning how money was converted and where we could obtain cash in each place
Preparing for emergencies, flight delays, safety, customs, medical problems, etc.
Examining ways to communicate with the folks in the US while overseas
Researching European transportation systems
Planning activities while we were there
Building in some flexibility for unexpected side trips

Note that all of the tasks in my plan were focused on accomplishing the purpose (experiencing Italy). Of course, there was a great deal more that went into the planning of this trip. I probably spent 150 hours on planning to make our Italian vacation the trip of a lifetime. On the first day of our trip, we struck out from home that morning for the airport all excited. My dream of twenty years was finally coming true! As I unloaded my luggage from the car, I pulled from my pocket an American Express flyer offering luggage protection insurance for about $10 per person. They even guaranteed to find lost luggage within three hours! Something really pushed me to obtain that insurance before I left. But I had run out of time and hey, I saved $40 (remember this thought).

Where do you want to go?

Running a business can be just like my Italian experience. It requires a lot of planning and it is very important that you have a clear roadmap that outlines exactly where you and your staff want to go. We can spend so much time planning for a two-week personal trip (like I did when going to Italy), but we often fail to plan for a bigger adventure—the future of our small businesses years out. I have coached many business owners and managers who are working “in the business versus on the business.” Many are also flying by the seat of their pants and only thinking from one week or month to the next. As long as the money is rolling in, who cares? If you give your staff marching orders, they can carry out the plan very well. But they are not focused on the BIG picture, the dream, or the mission. They often emphasize and live in the present.

Fortunately, while I am far from being perfect, I am blessed with the ability to envision the future and have surrounded myself with people smarter and more organized than I am to help me execute my visions. Fifteen years ago, I told my son, Blake, “I have this dream of building a convention center…I can see this beautiful building….the marble floors….the comfortable setting….the beautiful offices….very comfortable chairs….great food…the glass façade in the front! I will build this building one day!”

In 2003, we completed a 40,000 square-foot convention center called the Columbia Conference Center (www.columbiameetings.com). It took a lot of planning, hiring outstanding staff to help generate the money to pay for and manage the center, and the help of the good Lord to make it happen. It is fun having a dream, designing the plan, and then, as one of our company mottos says, “We turn dreams into reality!” It scares my family (and my staff) sometimes when I start talking about my dreams. But isn’t it fun to dream about the future? It is really exciting when you see your dream turn into reality as I did with our convention center. Every day I walk through the center and thank God and my staff for this mighty blessing!

Small business owners sometimes know generally where they want to go and how to get there. But many times, the vision is sitting in their heads, not on paper, and their staff does not know about that dream or plan. The staff waits around for orders and does not have any involvement or ownership in the plan. When the leader does not communicate the vision or dream to the troops or fails to build ownership of the plan with everyone, the company engine slows down as employees await orders from above. Many businesses are built solely around the owners or leaders instead of the entire company and staff. If the leader gets sick, becomes disabled, or dies, the company slows, withers, and sometimes fails because the staff has not been involved in the dream the owner had. We will talk later in the book about how to avoid this through succession planning.

How do I apply strategic planning principles to a business?

Through much friendly, open, candid debate and many strategic planning sessions, our companies have defined their purpose, vision, mission, values, and management plans. I’ll share with you how we developed these things so that you can have an idea of how to apply these principles to your own company. When coming up with what these components mean to your business, make sure that you solicit input from team leaders and other staff at every possible opportunity. When your staff has helped develop a plan, they will be more receptive to embracing and implementing it. Now, let’s discuss strategic planning in more detail.

Purpose

Purpose is what your company exists to do, your reason for being (other than to make money, of course). Two of our companies develop and evaluate government grants for 60 school districts, 300 schools, and other large non-profits in the southeastern United States like the United Way of Greater Metropolitan Atlanta. By doing this, we positively affect the lives of many people, most of them children. Our leadership team, with input from all of our staff, came up with a purpose that we believe describes what we do here at Research Associates (www.grantexperts.com) and The Evaluation Group (www.evaluationgroup.com): Creating opportunities to improve lives. This noble phrase describes our broad reason for being: creating opportunities (through grant writing and evaluation) to improve the lives of people in the southeast. The purpose has to go beyond making a profit or simply pleasing customers.

Values

Having clearly-defined values is important because your company’s values define how staff members interact with each other and how the company engages clients and the rest of the world. We have a broad set of values that our companies tailor to their individual needs. The principles remain the same, but how each division or company applies them as part of its daily routine is slightly different. The values among all my companies are: Excellence, Initiative, Accountability, Ethics, and Openness. These values help in our decision-making and influence all that we do.

Excellence symbolizes not just our commitment to being a good company, but our goal of becoming a great one. We maintain high standards and strive to produce outstanding goods and services that not only satisfy but exceed customer expectations.
Initiative means that we are self-motivated to finish all projects punctually, creatively, and in a way that adheres to our high standards. We foster and value entrepreneurialism.
Accountability means that we maintain a climate of individual and corporate responsibility where we “inspect what we expect.” We develop procedures that ensure we do what we say in a quality way.
Ethics mean that we consistently do the right, honest thing in regard to our dealings within and outside of the company.
Openness is our dedication to creating an environment where people can speak their minds honestly and express their thoughts without fear of retaliation. The sharing of ideas, strategies, and constructive criticism is welcomed and encouraged.

Vision

Developing and following a clear vision is imperative to the success of a company. Former Southwest Airlines CEO Howard Putnam once said, “Most companies fail in their growth because they don’t have a vision. When you have a vision and someone comes to you with some convoluted idea, you can hold it up to the vision and ask: ‘Does it fit? Does it fly? If not, don’t bother me.”

Openness and staff input are important in determining how we operate our company, so we are taking our time to make sure that our vision fully and accurately describes our “big picture” for the future. I will never forget President John F. Kennedy establishing his vision for the future in the 1960s, when he said, “We are going to the moon in ten years!” Look at all “the right stuff” that took place as a result of that dream!

In 2008, our companies are in the process of developing our new ten-year vision. Like Kennedy, we plan to look out a decade and dream about what we want to become in this time. We know that planning this far into the future (the “big dream”) is a long shot and our plans could change greatly in this time, but it helps to have a framework to guide us. Then, we are bringing that long-range vision down into a five-year plan. We are having robust debate about this vision to allow significant input from everyone. We want everyone to say at the end, “That is my vision and I had a lot to say about what the dream will be.” We will bring the five-year vision down into a short-term, specific eighteen-month plan. As Bossidy told me, “Start out broad and end up as definitive as you can.” Remember that the vision is the big picture—the dream. What you finally want to accomplish is for every employee to say, “I can see the vision and I want to be a part of this glorious plan!”

Mission

Our mission will be the vehicle that takes us forward. After reviewing hundreds of mission statements from other organizations, we had a strong idea of what ours would be. Our mission is to be the leader at helping schools and large nonprofits in the southeastern US obtain and use grant resources effectively and efficiently to achieve their missions. This mission describes who we are/will be (the leader), our targeted audience (schools and large nonprofits), our target area (southeastern US), and what we do (help our customers obtain and use grant resources efficiently to achieve their missions). Articulating our mission into a clear direction helps us identify who we want to be with some specificity over who and where we serve. That way, we are focused on our mission and are not chasing money all over the United States.

Management Plan

Each leader has created a management plan for his division or company. A management plan contains the essentials: goals, measurable objectives, budget targets, and tasks associated with each objective, who will lead each task, and the date to complete each task. Management plans help you focus on the smaller details (steps you take as you climb the mountain of success) that combine to allow you to pursue your mission and vision. In one of my conversations with Bossidy, he gave some wise advice: “Describe the plan before you develop the plan. Then add points of accountability along the way.”

How do I develop a strategic plan?

First, you may want to Google “small business strategic plans” and “business mission statements” on the Internet. There is a lot of research and information available online that can provide you with more details than I have in this chapter. The Small Business Administration has another site worth visiting (www.sba.com). Also, try to find a simple book on strategic planning that is easy to read and contains common sense information (some are suggested at the end of this chapter). There is even computer software that will take you through the process. Your first step is to understand what strategic planning is all about. Remember: there are many different methods and definitions regarding strategic plans. Look beyond the terminology to find the strategic planning method that meets your organization’s needs.

Before you write your business plan and begin your journey, assess your industry and competitors. Your competitors can teach you a lot if you study them, and it is surprising how much information they will post on their websites. We will cover competition analysis in another chapter of this book. Next, go to the beach or the mountains (or wherever you love to go) and sit alone on the balcony or another quiet place for several days to dream. My favorite place to do this is the Hawaiian Islands. While there, think about where your business is going and how to get there (I suggest making an outline with notes). However, while you want to “think outside the box,” remember to dream within reason—keep it reality-focused. As Bossidy told me, “There are many heroes out there who developed unrealistic and grandiose plans that failed!”

Then, arrange a getaway with your team at the beach or a relaxed environment to dream, debate, and conceptualize together. Build in some fun team-building activities and breaks during the day or night so that you are mixing work and play. However, don’t turn your dream into a nightmare by scheduling your planning around intense workload times. Figure out the times of the year when company workloads are most manageable and make your getaway during these periods. You don’t want to bring people to plan for the future when they are drowning in their current work, or staff will be irritable, hostile, and inattentive. The leader must also send the clear message that strategic planning is very important and must be done. At the same time, you must be sensitive toward your staff when planning for the future. As Larry Bossidy counseled me, “Don’t rush this!”

When planning, remember that you have different types of employees in your organization who will view, support, and resist strategic planning in various ways. Their styles may include: creative dreamers, entrepreneurs, planners, highly organized (and disorganized) people, and those who can execute (tell them what to do and they will do it). Everyone plays a role in planning and execution of the plan, but keep in mind that there are major differences amongst your employees. I recommend that you take all your employees through an excellent three-day leadership course by Don Jenkins of Leader’s Advantage (www.leadersadvantage.us), who also consulted my companies on formulating their strategic plan. Don’s training helped me and my employees understand who we are as leaders and individuals and how to work best with each other, which had a profound impact on our ability to map out our strategic plan.

Next, be sure to take time to educate staff about the importance of planning and what the various planning definitions mean. Keep the training simple! I recommend that you write your strategic plan on a high school reading level so that it is understandable and doable for everyone. Avoid using complicated strategic planning jargon or acronyms that people outside of your organization (and even some insiders) won’t understand. When you are writing your plan, take your audience into consideration. If you are trying to secure company funding, then the bank is your primary focus. If your employees will be reviewing it, then the plan may need to take a different approach. For example, your banker will want to see evidence of balance sheets, assets, income statements, budgets, cash flow predictions, customer contracts, etc. The banker’s motive is to make a profit from the interest the bank charges the company and make certain that the business is likely to pay back the loan. After all, his or her job is on the line! A 2001 plan I wrote for a bank loan was about three inches thick and had all sorts of attachments, but the employees only saw about 20 pages. Ideally, one basic plan should be developed for everyone, but with different attachments included for different audiences.

Tim Berry of Entrepreneur.com recommends keeping your list of priorities short and simple. “A plan that stresses three or four main priorities is a plan with focus and power,” he says. Our organizations’ philosophy is to “do fewer things really well” versus “a lot of things fairly well.” You want your organization and employees focused on the core of your business: what you do best, what is the most profitable, and what you are passionate about (your “Hedgehog Concept,” described by Jim Collins in his bestseller Good to Great).

How far out should I plan?

There is great debate about how much into the future a business should plan. Peter Drucker once stated, “Even five years would be absurdly long.” Larry Bossidy has said that when he led General Electric and Honeywell, they never planned more than three years out. “Sure, you can plan in five, 10, or even 20-year horizons in the major conceptual text, but you can’t plan in monthly detail past the first year,” Entrepreneur.com’s Tim Berry writes. Because some businesses are involved in volatile markets, planning even one year ahead can be tough! At our companies, we chose to develop a solid five-year plan with measurable targets but will dream beyond that. Our detailed budget forecast only takes us out three years.

Before you finalize your plan, mark it “DRAFT” and circulate it among all employees. Meet with them individually and in small groups to talk through the issues. And, above all, LISTEN! If this is your first plan, seek others to critique your work and be open to debate and different opinions. The more input you solicit, the more choices you will have to select from. Be sure that the plan is realistic and attainable. Some business researchers say to dream big in your plan, but make sure you don’t create a “pie in the sky” strategy that will kill everyone. Aim high, but be conservative on income projections and liberal when projecting expenses. My philosophy has always been to set high expectations but “under-promise and over-deliver” in everything we do. This includes how we plan for the future. However, I believe that you should be very realistic. If you are presenting the plan to a banker, you had better have all your i’s dotted and t’s crossed because they will tear your plan apart and challenge everything.

The plan could be as short as a few pages, but should not exceed 25 pages (excluding appendices). I prefer to write the plan as a narrative with tables and graphs. Once you have debated and completed the plan, I would suggest that a technical writer go through it to tighten up the grammar and word flow. If you don’t know a technical writer, a local high school English teacher should be more than happy to review it for $30 an hour. You should be able to hand your plan to a person who has no knowledge about you or your business (or even the business world) and he or she should clearly understand the message (remember to write on a high school level). The final plan should then be reviewed with staff every month and kept in the forefront of your company’s activities. In other words, don’t file it away! Review and update it often, inspect what you expect, be open to changes, and allow for flexibility. But for the most part, stick with the plan unless new information emerges that calls for changes. You don’t want a new plan coming out every week!

Next, assign the final plan to a highly organized, can-do, pleasant person who will monitor the outcomes and direction and ensure it gets done. I have been in too many meetings or around too many creative people who were filled with great ideas, but could not implement them – all talk and no action. Great ideas poorly implemented are like gold at the end of the rainbow—always just out of reach. As Joel Barker once said, “Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with vision is making a positive difference!”

Should I bring in a strategic planning consultant?

Our companies seriously considered doing our strategic planning ourselves. We asked, “Why do we need to pay a planning consultant, when we could develop our own strategic plan?” Of course, you can develop your own strategic plan, as I did over the years (until 2005). The key objective is to actually do one, no matter how it comes about. But I am convinced that if you have the right independent consultant to lead you and your staff through the process, the outcomes will be much more accurate, your business will experience higher levels of success, and the plan will be better received and owned by the team.

I suggest that you bring in a wise and competent outsider, an experienced, independent strategic planner who will tactfully challenge you as he or she stands outside your circle. This means that you will have to curb your ego and allow the facilitator to ask the tough questions about where staff members want to go. It will also mean that you will have to settle into the planning group as “one of them” and not try to dominate the outcomes. You will have to take your president’s (or owner’s) hat off, and for the most part, keep quiet and listen! I believe you should participate, but only after others have injected their input. You want to develop a culture of robust debate where your people openly express their opinions. You simply don’t want to surround yourself with a bunch of “yes employees” who will think only like you do. But in the end, you will have to make the final (and sometimes tough) decisions, since you cannot run a company like a democracy.

Our companies have used the services of two very different strategic planners. First, we consulted with Dr. Kenn Allen of Civil Society Consulting Group, (www.civilsocietyconsulting.com). I thought I knew strategic planning fairly well, but this guy built excitement within our company, forced us to look at our “real” mission, did not mind giving us a swift but polite kick in the rear end, and (the bottom line) made us think about where we were going. He also pushed us to not come to conclusions before we had all the facts. He didn’t tell us what to do; he just kept asking questions and guiding us. Even with my 25 years of small business experience, I felt like a student under Kenn and would highly recommend him.

When we worked with Kenn in 2006, he helped us figure out where it was that we wanted to go. After the initial excitement wore off and he left, however, the plan stalled—we simply failed to execute it. We got too distracted with working in the business versus on the business. Planning became a lower priority. We knew our destination but not the route to take to reach it. In 2008, we hired a second can-do consultant, Don Jenkins. Don has done an excellent job helping us move toward the targets we set with Kenn, coupling them with new ideas. Don keeps us on track and encourages us to set concrete goals and act on them in a timely manner. Each of our employees goes through leadership training with Don to better understand his or her leadership potential and how this fits into the strategic plan for our company.

However, in hindsight, I would recommend that you utilize only one consultant throughout the process to keep things consistent. As you read through the literature on strategic planning, you will find many different approaches to it. Even definitions of terms can cause conflict because you can get hung up on definitions instead of utilizing a simple process that fits your company. Some consultants are married to their own words and strategic planning philosophies and are unwilling to adapt their processes to the company they are working with. Try to find a proven consultant who is a wise, flexible, patient facilitator and can guide your group in a positive, friendly manner. Check references to make sure he or she will fit into your organization’s culture. Above all, make sure that your team drives your strategic planning versus turning your roadmap into a consultant-driven process. In the end, the consultant will leave, and you and your employees will need to own and implement the process yourselves. You simply do not want a beautifully-bound strategic plan that sits unused on a shelf!

What if something doesn’t go as planned?

Were you wondering what happened on my trip to Italy? In spite of all my planning, our flight from Columbia, SC was delayed because of thunderstorms. We arrived late in Atlanta, GA missing the connecting flight to Rome by only 30 minutes (even though I had built in four hours of leeway for flight delays). We were diverted to Spain on an alternate flight. The airline representative assured us that our luggage would follow and that we could fly from Spain on Italian airlines. Once we landed in Spain, it was like a zoo, we couldn’t find anyone who spoke English, and airline toll-free numbers did not work overseas. Our luggage was lost and the trip of a lifetime turned into “a trip from Hell!” Getting tied up in Spain resulted in the entire trip being off by one day, making all my carefully-planned hotel reservations behind one day or void. While I thought that I had planned for everything, Murphy’s Law set in and what could go wrong went wrong! It was a “perfect storm” of mistakes.

When we arrived at our five-star hotel in Rome, we looked like the Beverly Hillbillies, and after two days without changing clothes, we also smelled pretty ripe. Our blood pressure was off the charts after riding with an Italian taxi driver from the airport to the Hilton hotel located in the middle of nowhere. I will never forget the look on the concierge’s face when she saw me and my bedraggled family. She said, “Let me run your credit card first and then we will get you registered.” The look that she gave me said, “Are you sure you are at the right hotel? Is your credit card good?” Eventually, we got settled into our rooms, got our luggage back (several days later), and got our trip back on schedule. Remember that American Express luggage insurance that I saved $40 by not buying? I would have paid $5,000 to have my luggage arrive on time with me in Italy. Guess what I will be buying the next time I go overseas? Lesson learned: expect the unexpected.

Strategic planning can be like my Italian vacation. You can lay out a perfectly detailed plan that is ambitious but realistic, only to have circumstances beyond your control derail you temporarily (or even permanently). But if you have planned well and are aware of your purpose, vision, values, and how you will apply your plans specifically in your management plan, you will be able to get back on track. The point is: the more you plan, the faster you will be able to react when something goes wrong. Things rarely happen exactly as we’d like them to, but if you have a solid strategic plan for your business, you’ll be able to adapt quickly when something goes awry.

Remember…

Poor planning is one of the top causes of business failure, making a good plan may be the difference between your business thriving, just getting by, or dying. Above all, when you develop your plan, remember my Italian experience and my entrepreneurial grandmother’s advice: “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst!” At the end of your strategic planning process, everyone should be able to say, with passion, clarity, ownership, and excitement, “I know where we are going and how to get there! Let’s go!”

Mike DuBose is a field instructor with USC’s graduate school and has been in business since 1981. He is the servant leader and owner of six debt-free corporations, including Columbia Conference Center, Research Associates and The Evaluation Group.

© Copyright Mike DuBose June 2008. You have permission to reproduce any part of this article provided that the contents are not altered and the full description of the author and his book are given credit. No part of this article may be used in a for-profit activity without the author’s written permission. Columbia Conference Center, Research Associates, and The Evaluation Group are registered service marks.

Suggested Reading:

The Corporate Compass by Ed Ruggero and Dennis Haley
The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton
Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies by Rhonda M. Abrams