This is an old project management saying: how to apply it to your own business
Remember I mentioned reviewing your knowledge from your previous career. Well as a project manager, that’s all I did. Plan, plan and re-plan. Without a plan you have no direction.
Any road will do when you don’t know where you’re heading
How do you know you’ve arrived if you don’t know where you’re going?
True also that life is the journey not the destination.
Another old project management saying is: When you are up to your arse in crocodiles it’s easy to forget the objective is to empty the swamp.
Okay – enough already.
Let me tell you my story on how I started with my first life plan and how that evolves in to my business and marketing plans.
I was 28 (in my head I’m still 28 even though I’ve had my 43rd birthday). I decided to take stock. Where did I want to be, what did I want to be? That’s the most powerful question of all. Who Do I want to be?
I knew I wanted to be a good manager. I had come across so many ‘bad’ managers in my time working for Rolls Royce Aero Engines and British Rail Trains. I just wanted to be a good manager. And I knew that one day – by the time I was fifty (which seemed an age away at that time) - I would have my own business. I’d like it to be based on Betties Tea Rooms in Yorkshire, England. Why? Because it’s the best experience of customer service and good food that I had ever come across. I liked the attention to detail to create a great dining experience. I liked that I could be served by a lady in 19th centaury dress, that I could buy tea and coffee from the adjoining shop to take home and that they made their own chocolate on the premise.
I manoeuvred myself around the company I was working for at the time and hunted out and applied for promotions as the opportunities presented themselves. These new jobs took me up the senior management ladder. By the time I was 34 I had a really nice company car and a great salary. The problem was it felt more like corporate slavery than something I was passionate about. Yes I was now a senior manager with all the trimmings, but I hardly saw my kids, I didn’t enjoy the 3-4 hours of travel every day and I just knew that working this hard wasn’t fun anymore. I had achieved exactly what I set out to do and in just a few short years had more than doubled my salary. I was even earning more than my husband and he was better educated than me. I remember thinking, if I had my own business and worked this hard for me rather than for someone else, based on past experience, I had a good chance I would find success.
Then tragedy struck!
I lost my sister – she was 10 years younger than me and my ½ sister. She had learning difficulties and had always been picked on at school. She was beaten up by a group of her so-called friends.
It was a turning point for me.
My reason why, went off the scale. I knew first hand life was too short to do anything I didn’t feel passionate about any more.
I planned to go part-time and started my home staging business in the other ½ of my time. It took me 2 years before I had enough courage, customers and money, to leave the security of my day job.
If I hadn’t taken the time to make my life plan, I wouldn’t have seen the opportunity or Devine Inspiration when it came. But boy did I have a dreadful kick up the backside. The plans had been there but it was more comfortable to stay in the day job than to act. When tragedy struck, that was my wake-up call.
In the plan that was just sitting there, I had created a number of actions I would like to complete: like taking my son to piano lessons, buying and renovating a period house house, starting my new business. 5 years later, I found that piece of paper. It felt strange to see the list. All of which I had achieved over the previous few years. I know firsthand, that’s the power of writing down a plan. It focuses the subconscious mind to find a way of making it happen. If I hadn’t bothered to do the plan, I would have had no direction or purpose and would have drifted, goodness knows where.
I now make a point of designing a life plan every 7 years and up to now, it’s working well. I’m on my 3rd iteration.
I started writing the plan as a list of things I wanted to get, do and achieve on a sheet of paper, then I went on to create a dream book, where I would cut out pictures of things I wanted to get, do and achieve and paste them in. I now I use a similar method of creating a journey board and placing it on the wall over my desk so I can see it every day. I cut pictures from magazines of the car I want to drive, the places I want to visit, and place on it the people I want to be with like my family and kids. I’ve even been known to cut out my head and stick it on to the bodies of others in an image that I want to recreate. I then put dates against each picture. I understand that the brain reacts better to pictures than words and the subconscious mind goes to work to make it happen. I wish project management planning had been so easy and so much fun. I really does work. Before I relocated to the USA I created my next 7 year dream board together with the month we planned to move, picture of the house we would live in and what month our UK house would sell. It worked spookily well. My husband has now got use to my ways and knows it something that works for me.
If you’ve just been downsized, lost your job or are taking stock, developing a life plan like this can really help you get the balance in your life. You could even print out checks to yourself to signify the kind of income you want. Those of you who have read The Secret will know what I’m talking about. Go to www.thesecret.com and to www.mikedoodley.com for more ideas on how to leverage your life plan and create a journey board or book.
If you haven’t considered developing a 7 year life plan, I seriously suggest you do.
The Business Plan – I had come from an IT background as a projects manager and I had built business cases which helped me to develop a business plan for my own business. Many new business owners think they only need a business plan if they are looking for funding from the bank. This is perhaps the one most overlooked parts of building businesses. Many business owners keep it in their heads. It’s easy to get away with that when you are accountable to no-one except yourself.
But I would seriously suggest you not only create one when you start your business but you continually update it on a regular basis. It’s a great way of capturing your ideas and prioritising the work you will do. It helps you to think about the return on your time investment too and helps you identify your reason why behind a particular idea or strategy.
Remember I said that I sometimes find myself up in the middle of the night working on my Devine Inspiration? Well sometimes it’s just getting the idea on to paper that helps me get back to sleep. Maybe there is some initial action, perhaps it’s a ‘to do list’ of things I need to do. The Business Plan is a great place to collect all these ideas together. When you have those moments of ‘what’s next’ in your business, you can review your ideas and decide what’s next based on your reason why and your current objectives. It’s a great place to go on those ‘stuck’ days when you can look up and see where you are heading, make any readjustments or postpone some of the less important trivia that keeps you busy but not always in the most productive way possible for your overall objective.
The Business Plan is also worth reviewing at the end of the year when you are planning for your new year. It helps you to identify your resources and your time commitments on each area of your business.
Review, revise, reposition.
Three things which will be critical in this market when you are having to work harder for every $
Key elements of a business case:
SWOT Analysis
Channels to market
Who are your clients (everyone is not an option) – Define demographics – age/income, location
The first pass of your business case is to answer as many of the sections as you can – putting questions in the areas that you can’t complete. The first pass through is a ‘brain dump’ session. The questions will stay in your subconscious for a while, at least over night. In the morning you may have a moment of Divine Inspiration. Act on it. Document what you will do even if you don’t have time to do at that very moment. Think of your Business Plan more as a Divine Inspiration Idea Catcher.
When my 16 year old daughter, came to me with her latest business idea, the first thing I wanted her to do was to capture the idea in a business case. She woke up at 2pm and couldn’t get the idea out of her head. Boy I know that feeling. Talk about being a daughter of mine.
Writing the idea down in a business case structure helped her to document the idea and get it out of her head and help her to get down the questions she needed to find answers to. As she discovered more information, it became clear there were a number of obstacles to overcome. That she might need to compromise on the initial idea and she need to ask herself deep questions like, if she couldn’t do it this way but could do it that way, would she still want to? This business case took 3 weeks to complete before she came up with the realisation that it’s probably not practical. She did all this without spending any money. She did loads of research and even spoke to people outside the family about it. Do you think she learnt a lot from the exercise? Do you think it will help her with her next business project? You bet it will and I’m sure Emma will be a business owner at a much younger age than I was. Here is a copy of her business case. If you’ve not already got your idea on to paper, take a couple of evenings to write it down. It really helps you get clear about what you want, where you will compromise and what you will have to do – and ask yourself – Am I prepared to do it.
Review the business case regularly. Add in more information as you find it and change it if you need to. Don’t try to keep it all in your head. It really does help clarify and give you focus, even if you don’t need funding. It helps you to keep tabs on your own personal investment of time.
Don’t be a busy fool – get focused.
Then go through the next section and make sure you have clarity of vision and definition – then you can start work on your USP and complete the business case.
After you have created this high level document called The Business Case, you can start to think about forming your Marketing Plan for your business. We’ll cover that in more detail later, because the purpose of this book is to help you develop your marketing plan – which for accuracy we’ll call your Visibility Creator Plan. As we go though the next sections I will give you ideas to add to your visibility and credibility so you become the ‘go to’ girl or guy for what you do. You get known for something. You get expert status.
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