You need a plan to take you from your idea all the way to success
This is not true. What you actually need is an execution plan that goes all the way from start to finish and takes all your actions and their requirements into account. This is not the same thing at all. As we discuss under organic growth below there will be times when you are trying things out and a monolithic plan will limit this too much to be practical. There is a military maxim that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The equivalent is true for companies; no business plan will survive contact with the outside world. Goals strategies and tactics may remain and internal requirements may well still be required but there will be changes to fit circumstance.
There are two types of business plan:
1 Goals, tactics and milestones
2 What you are going to do, when how and with whom
Both types are extremely useful but in different ways.
Goals, tactics and milestones help to set the corporate direction and accomplish the company’s aims.
Without milestones things remain static, the company fails to move and stagnation takes place. With them progress becomes measurable and progress is achieved.
Goals are required to ensure the company moves in the right direction. It is not enough to do things right, you must be doing the right thing. Providing you have done the research before setting goals, the goals help you steer the company in the right direction. When orienteering it is good to choose a distant but visible land mark to head towards. This is your milestone and ensures that day to day progress is going the right way.
Tactics are for use when the company hits difficulties progressing towards the goals or milestones. These are ways of dealing with foreseeable problems and approaches the company plans to take.
A detailed plan describing what you are going to do, when, how and with whom is also useful. This kind of plan can be used during execution to ensure no balls are dropped and that progress continues when what to do is not clear. It can be used in this way, and often should but it has another more useful purpose.
The other purpose is to do the jobs that you, as a company, need to have done. Any task relies upon several sub tasks and unless you visualise every step it is easy to miss out something critical; as Mrs Beaton says first catch your bird.
This is really what the management gurus are talking about when they tell you to visualise success.
Visualising is not about trying to get the positive mindset that allows you to remain positive and convey your idea with enthusiasm.
Visualising is about understanding the whole process from end to end and in its entirety. Again I find myself drawn to terms that sound slightly fuzzy and mystic but are meant in an almost brutally real way. You need to visualise, you need a holistic approach you need to understand how what you are doing is part of the universe; what is your company’s karmic footprint?
I have already said what I mean about visualisation, so what about the holistic approach? Well that is a question of looking at what the effects of one action will have on the other actions required.
For example, if we need a person to do each of a dozen things is it reasonable for that person to do them sequentially? If some of them need to be done in parallel does that imply a need for another person? If so how can this additional person affect the potentially sequential actions; can some of them now run in parallel too? Does their running in parallel and so finishing earlier have any knock on effects? Are people peole going to be left with nothing to do because things are finishing earlier? How could these people be used elsewhere? Can they be reassigned to the sort of work that never normally has time set aside for it? Equally what does an extra person do to the cash flow?
A holistic approach is about maintaining internal consistency and ensuring that there are no unexpected consequences of the pieces under your control.
“A holistic Approach
is how you break the law of unintended consequences”
Finally we come to how it all fits into the world around us. If holism is about internal consistency and controllable factors then the karmic fit is in part how the company affects the world and in part how real world conditions affect the company. Again, do not ignore secondary effects. If the company is going to threaten an industry sector what can they do about it and how will that affect the company. Look at all external interactions. Examine potential suppliers, what their reliability means to the company. Examine potential customers and what service levels they are used to expecting. If your company will be business critical for your customers will they demand more than they do of non critical partners? If you are not business critical for your customers then will they bother using you at all?
Finally we come to how it all fits into the world around us. If holism is about internal consistency and controllable factors then the karmic fit is in part how the company affects the world and in part how real world conditions affect the company. Again, do not ignore secondary effects. If the company is going to threaten an industry sector what can they do about it and how will that affect the company. Look at all external interactions. Examine potential suppliers, what their reliability means to the company. Examine potential customers and what service levels they are used to expecting. If your company will be business critical for your customers will they demand more than they do of non critical partners? If you are not business critical for your customers then will they bother using you at all?
Once you have examined your business from this karmic standpoint go over your action plan again and work out how long things will take, what revenue they will produce when and how much they will cost at what points. Work out what cash the business will have after each cost on the assumption that you are not getting paid. This will give you an overall expected debt level. Double it. This will give you a realistic expected debt level. Now do the same thing on the assumption that you are getting paid at the very end of your payment terms allowed period. This will give you a realistic target to aim for. Consider whether you need to alter your payment terms and examine what the knock on effects of that would be.