To plan, or not to plan?

Planning is a process of organizing your thoughts, resources, and efforts, and aligning these with defined goals and objectives. Sometimes you can do this in your head while showering in the morning. Other times it involves half a dozen people, a formalized methodology (a ‘plan for a plan’), several weeks, months, or years of work, and even a consultant or two for good measure. A plan is the documention of the outcome of a planning effort.

“All my life I wanted to be a somebody. Now I realize I needed to be more specific.”
Lily Tomlin

There are a million obvious reasons for business leaders and entrepreneurs to ‘do planning’ but there is really only one reason to create a plan, and that’s to communicate something important to others who need to know. And if there’s one thing we know in business, there are always a lot of people who need or want to know about what you have planned for the future.

Ultimately, deciding whether to spend a lot of precious time and attention on planning depends almost entirely on two things:

1. How much risk you can handle
2. How efficiently that risk must be managed for the venture to succeed

The decision of whether to produce a plan depends on who and how many people you need to communicate with about what needs to be done, by whom, when, and where, how much of it, and to what standards.

Quite often, the planners of a venture already know ‘in their head’ much of what will go into the business plan (this is true for almost any kind of strategic planning). However, the actual development of the business plan document greatly helps to clarify purpose and ensure that key stakeholders are all “on the same page.”

Frequently, the ‘customer’ for the plan is yourself. Consider that the actual process of producing a plan will expose many things that can help or hinder your path forward, and can be invaluable in shaping the strategies that will help you reach your goals.

“Luck is not a strategy, hope is not a plan.”
originalthinking

So, deciding whether or not to plan should be a forgone conclusion for anyone who hopes to succeed in business – as long as you use judgement in fitting the task to the need.

If you want more information, read business planning basics for more discussion of when to plan and what a good business plan should contain.