Plan your way to success
Every entrepreneur starts their new business filled with dreams of amazing success. This dream of success motivates individuals to engage themselves in the necessary actions to undertake the risk of supplying the market with something phenomenal. Despite this exciting start, several months to a year later, many entrepreneurs are engaged in a fierce struggle to develop a business that matches the expectations they started the journey with.
The journey to entrepreneurial success
This growth or startup phase of the entrepreneurial journey generally favors the entrepreneur who had articulately planned for its occurrence. The challenge is that most entrepreneurs fail to engage in comprehensive planning ahead of their entrepreneurial journey. So many entrepreneurs are deluded by the perceived clarity of their business idea in their mind which many also engage in writing on paper, with the feeling that this action converts their ideas to a plan. Sad to say, what it really does is to transfer an idea from the mind to an idea on paper. This still does not meet the requirements of a comprehensive plan leaving the entrepreneur ill-equipped to manage the challenges of a startup business. Similar challenges also occur in the maturity and decline stages of the business life cycle in the absence of a well-evaluated and structured strategy.
Plan vs Idea
You see every great plan begins with an idea however a well-thought-out idea is still not a plan no matter how much thought went into it. A plan will properly evaluate the business idea on which it is based. It will carefully examine your ideas and test their feasibility in the context of the market reality. Using available data, a plan will provide you with a prediction as to your potential market response, required resources and identifies potential opportunities and challenges. It will structure your ideas into a logical framework that provides clarity to all stakeholders. A plan provides detailed insights into your business future giving the entrepreneur a solid basis for decision making, clarity and confidence in their actions.
Planning essential for success
In business, success very rarely or ever occurs by accident. Success is the product of comprehensive strategies and planning. An entrepreneur seeking success must value the prerequisite of effective planning. An army will never go to war without a strategy. Such actions would be guaranteed to result in significant loss of lives and resources. Much the same, an entrepreneur should never embark on their entrepreneurial journey without a comprehensive business plan. Such action is almost guaranteed to result in significant losses of resources both financial and physical. You see, every entrepreneur must understand that every error in business carries with it a cost. There are no free passes.
Benefits of business planning
A well-researched comprehensive plan provides a roadmap for success. It will guide the entrepreneur much like a war strategy guides an army to win the battle against its opponent. A plan provides insights into the future and tests your potential market prior to investing resources. As such, a plan is your initial evaluation of the viability of your business idea. All entrepreneurs and businesses are required to engage in an ongoing cycle of planning, resource allocating, monitoring, controlling, adjusting and back to planning again. A plan helps to identify potential opportunities and critical risks giving the entrepreneur the foresight to capitalize on them and protect themselves against potential risks.
Comprehensive planning is essential to your business success. Get the support you need to strategize and position your business for success. Contact Business Lifeline Ltd today.