Business Planning vs. Business Motion Planning

I constantly get potential projects and clients that are looking for help growing their buisness and the first thing I ask them is do you have a business plan? Of course if they do they show me the standard business plan format that almost everyone uses and has used for 50 years. It has your executive summary, your financials, your market analysis, your product or service analysis and some projections. And it is typically prepared for their banker or potential investors. The problem with all those plans are that they are static documents they show what the business will look like at some point in the future but there is one major thing missing, how the heck are they going to get there? The major component that is missing is action or motion, what are the specific things they are going to do to achieve this picture they have painted.

A business motion plan gets them thinking about the how they are going to get there, this plan can be done very simply, it may just lay out the specific things they are going to do or it may break it into specific steps such as I talk about in Ultimate Breakthrough Planning: The Business Funnel Approach where I give you a road map to create a business motion plan.

In my book I talk about creating an active document, a blue print that will you will use every single day to grow your business. Forget about your standard business plan and create a business motion plan that will keep your business moving forward even if tough times! You can here more about my process here: Ultimate Breakthrough Planning book overview

Tired of Bad News?

I was the keynote speaker at the Duluth Business to Business Expo yesterday in Duluth, MN and got the opportunity to present to a group of business owners. I started my presentation with the whole idea that it is becoming increasingly difficult for business owners and anyone else to stay positive and upbeat in light of the constant bombardment of bad news by the media. If we do a side by side comparison of this recession to the one on 1981-82 it will show that this one is not really any worse than that one, however one big difference is the fact that in 1981-82 we didn't have the internet, we didn't have multiple news and business channels constantly overwhelming us with not only the news but their gloom and doom predictions. I never thought I would say this but I long for the days of election coverage and red maps and blue maps just so I don't have to listen to anymore gloom and doom.

I think the biggest challenge we all have is trying to tune out the distraction of the constant bad news and focus on those things that we can control, I have written about that before but I think today it is crucial in order to stay on task and do the things you need to do to keep your business moving forward. And look for good news, I hear stories everyday about businesses that are doing just fine and even having more success today than they did a year ago, so there are success stories out there, unfortunately those aren't nearly as appealing as the gloom and doom the networks like to cover! Maybe we all need to watch the clip of Howard Beale from the movie Network and proclaim in one voice to the media "we're mad as hell and we're not going to take this anymore".