The Power of Planning Ahead

How far ahead do you plan?

Recently I was having coffee with a friend who was planning on a trip to Novi, Michigan to spend time with his wife’s family.  It was a day trip and he was noticeably stressed about it.

It was a spur of the moment thing that sounded like fun to his wife but he’s the kind of person who doesn’t like surprises and especially ones like this.

His in-laws moved to a new house recently and he had never been there.  He was going to be relying on GPS to be his navigator and get him and his family to their destination a few hours away.  He also didn’t know how long they would be staying.  He wanted it to be a day-trip but his wife was open to making it an overnighter if she was having fun.

This lack of planning was driving the husband nuts while his wife was clearly excited for a little adventure.

I’ve seen this type of thing play out in the business world too.  Some business owners love to fly by the seat of their pants and see what happens.  Others won’t make a move until every detail is thought out and prepared for.

Do you fall into one or the other of those two mindsets with your business?

There are problems with both.

The person that has to have everything planned out before they take any action can be so consumed with the planning that they never take action.  All they end up with is hours and hours and hours of planning that by the time they are ready to launch, their idea is outdated.

And the person who just goes out there and does stuff, can waste a lot of energy and effort going around in circles or chasing dreams and ideas that are simply not financially feasible or long term sustainable.

You really need a combination of the two extremes.  Planning and Launching go hand in hand.  Once you launch your business, then you make adjustments as you learn.

I call it tweaking.  Not twerking, that was a bad idea from a few years ago.

Tweaking is the adjustments to your original plan to make it better.

In the marketing world, I urge businesses to not use their phone number or street address in their radio ads.  That’s different from a few years ago, but now with the advances in our phone technology, I can ask my phone for directions or I can ask my phone to call any business I hear advertised on the radio.  

We may give a location like at the corner of Coliseum and Coldwater, but not the exact street address.  

One of the issues I saw occur in the past year is many business owners felt like they should do more short term planning and abandon long term planning because what if the economy takes a dump?  My answer is to create a couple of plans.

You need to have a long term strategic plan and also short term tactical plans.  They need to be in harmony with each other.  

Some of you are planning for 4th quarter which is just a few weeks away.  Some of you think you are being adventurous by starting your plans for the entire next year.

I’m in the middle of developing a two year plan with goals focused on what we want to achieve in 2022 and 2023.  It’s something I don’t think our company has done before, thinking two years down the road instead of just one.  At the end of 2020, I had a plan for 2021. 6 months later, I discovered a couple of things.

First off, we were on track to grow and reach the goals we wanted to achieve.

However I also discovered that we had only implemented half of what I planned.  

Those observations are being taken into consideration as I plan for the years ahead, because I already have the ideas to get us where we want to be at the end of 2023 since I still have ideas from this year to put into action.

What if you hate planning, or you’re just not very good at it?

Perhaps you need to bring in someone that can help with planning for your business future.  Sometimes it’s an outsider, sometimes it’s someone you already have working with you.

By the way, when it comes to planning your advertising and marketing, I have a team of professionals who know how to ask the right questions to help partner with you to create both a strategic plan and the tactics to make it happen.

Reach out to me, Scott@WOWO.com and we’ll help.