Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

What’s your plan?

Probably the most critical skill that a business owner (and especially a consultant) needs is the ability to plan. Surprisingly, this isn’t a skill that many people can do well. Everyone says they can plan- but in reality, the plan is a collection of random items without structure and is effectively a “to do” list.

Why plan? Because you can set dates, milestones and budgets (all these things should be available from your plan). Most importantly - you can set expectations.

So what makes up a good plan?

The plan needs structure, and it needs to tell a story. I typically break a plan into 3 sections - Plan, Prepare, Execute.

Plan is just that - list out the tasks that you need to complete the plan. This includes research, structure, and other activities necessary to develop your plan.

Prepare is the section devoted to gathering the materials you need to actually perform the plan. This includes gathering materials, preparing documentation templates, and identifying remaining details about execution of your plan.

Finally Execute - these are the steps that actually make something happen.

What are the guidelines to creating a plan?

First - EVERY step in the plan has a deliverable. There should be a document, or some other tangible result of each step on your plan. “Think about marketing” isn’t a plan step - there’s no deliverable. “Develop Marketing Questionnaire” is a plan step - the deliverable is “Draft Questionnaire”.

Second - In order to define the plan - you have to be able to count everything. “Perform Market Research” is open ended - and you can’t count the deliverables. “Perform 3 target market studies”, with deliverables as “under 18, 18-35, 35 and up” are quantifiable and definative.

Third - assign effort, duration, due date and dollars. Each deliverable should have a number of hours associated with it, and an expected delivery date (example - performing market research may take only 8 hours of time, but the surveys will be conducted over a 2 week period. Both facts should be included in your plan. That way you can budget the time, and also have an expecation of when things should be complete. You should also assign cost to each line item (even if it’s your own time - put your expected hourly rate). That way you can really see that “time is moneY”.

Fourth - Manage. You’ve created the plan. However, no good plan is ever executed the way you drew it up. Some things will take longer than expected (an estimating problem). Some things won’t be available when you expect them…causing delay (a resource allocation problem). Some things you won’t know how to do - and you’ll need help (a skills problem). That’s where your skills as a manager come to play - you need to react to these things, juggle time, resources, and external factors to make sure that your end goal is achieved.

Fifth - Mitigate. Think about all the things that can go wrong in your plan. Make contingency plans for these items, or at least acknowledge the risks associated with them. You’ll be surprised how much thinking about “bad stuff” will cause you to re-think your plan and tackle something differently - in order to reduce the risk profile of your plan.

Good luck!

Posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:01 am and is filed under ProCore Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.