It’s an old saying but oh, so true!
Business startups don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan.
About 80% of startup businesses fail within the first three years. Yet, of the startups that had a plan, and stuck to it, less than 10% failed in the first 5 year period.
So clearly, you stack the odds on your side if you take the time to map out your business strategies before you start your business.
But what plans should you be formulating?
Are you dying to know what are your KSI’s? Well hold on a minute…
Really what I want to discuss is how you choose the right strategies when you are planning. You’ve probably taken some time off and wrote your Vision, Mission and Values Statement, and then detailed what this means in your day to day activity; you’ve probably brainstormed your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and worked out your goals for the year. But now, how do you choose between all the ideas to find the most critical strategies?
That’s where your KSI’s come in, or Key Strategic Issues.
If you’ve been following my blog posts, you’ll have seen that I have given you systems to prepare your business plan, along with implementable tools and procedures to move from a compelling vision to actions.
Yet, I still get many questions about how you actually implement your plan successfully. People tell me that while they have followed my training and been able to create practical business plans, the difficulty is in keeping up momentum when they start to implement the plan.
In order to keep up the momentum weeks into the implementation, you need to be able to “see” where you are up to and what you have achieved. That way, you are able to gauge your success, adjust accordingly, and quickly understand what is your next step.
So what’s the secret? Read More
Do you wonder how some people seemingly rack up win after win, complete project after project, apparently unswayed by detail and interruption?
Have you watched these people achieve goal after goal exactly as they set out to do and wondered what their secret was?
It’s because they set out with a very clear objective, and vision of what the end looks like. Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) called it his second habit “Begin with the end in mind.”
If you have a very clear picture of what the end should look like, it resolves so many problems along the way. If you know exactly what you want at the end, the answers to questions about detail like “who should be involved,” or “who do we hire out of these choices,” or “which option is the best” all become clear because you know exactly who you need in your team to put it together because of the skills you need; what type of person to hire to best suit the way it is to be managed at the end; and which option – despite the cost – best meets your objectives most efficiently.
A vision of the end not only sets the goals, but because you are so clear on what it looks like, also establishes the correct process of getting there, because anything that doesn’t or isn’t likely to get you to exactly the right place is out. Read More
Thanks for sharing the good tips. I usually plan ahead of things I least like to do and play the…
Like me, there are things you have to do that you don’t enjoy.
You know – go on a diet, exercise, that sort of thing. But you know you have to do it, and the consequences are clear, so you do them! I’m sure you have your ways to discipline yourself and to turn the mind from “have to” to “get to do!”
But what about in your business?
Sometimes in your business you have to do things that, not only do you not enjoy, but that you might actually hate to do!
These are situations where you have to cold-call a new customer (I know I hate that); or you have to discipline staff for some inappropriate behaviour; or perhaps even learning new skills. In these situations it’s not about not having the time, or feeling uncomfortable – it’s about actually hating to have to do it! That negativity causes procrastination and delay, you put it off, plans stall, your to-do list piles up, and perhaps your business even suffers.
These are not things that would be nice to do and which you don’t enjoy – these are things you hate doing but you absolutely must do because if you don’t your business really suffers!
How do you do those things in your business? Read More
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