What’s the Plan?

We’re going on the trip of a lifetime!

We can’t tell you where we’re going, how long we’ll be gone, or what we’ll do, but this is a great opportunity and we have a really good feeling about how it will turn out this time.

Want to join us?!...😃

Recently we’ve had several conversations with business owners about the importance of planning. Lessons learned over their years in business taught them all the same thing–you need to plan.

A plan will never work out exactly how you anticipated and will always need to change in some way–but that doesn’t justify not planning. In fact, it makes the need to plan even more necessary. 

How well do you expect to navigate changes if you don’t have a roadmap that’s guiding you in the first place? And how do you expect others to join you when they don’t know what to expect?

In our experience, it’s the practice of planning that keeps business owners adept, agile, and ahead of their markets and competitors.

Planning serves as a practice to keep you aligned while you’re building it as you fly. It creates structure, organization, and a way to manage time, budget, and expectations. It can look like:

• Empowering you to see the next steps you need to take when you're feeling overwhelmed

• Providing you with clarity around projects that can be delegated to current or new team members  

• Serving as a filter for new ideas and opportunities to see if they align with your plan and/or to determine if you'll need to drop something else to pursue them

• Giving you a way to check in on your goals to make sure you're staying accountable and on track

Overall, planning ensures that all crucial details and activities are accounted for, helping business owners and their teams to maximize the time they spend in the business and avoid preventable issues or missed opportunities.

When we do our planning in FTLOS, we ask and explore questions around seven pillars:

• Financials

• Operational Efficiency

• Visibility

• Product/Service development

• Client Experience

• Team Experience

• Personal/Professional Growth

Some pillars get more attention than others depending upon the season of business we find ourselves in, but each gets addressed whenever we have a planning session. 

As we’ve embraced the practice of planning, we’ve gotten better at the planning process. And the better we’ve gotten at the planning process, the better our plans have worked out.