You’ve developed the five parts of your Simple Business Plan. You’ve talked them over, dissected and digested them. They are how you want them now. You aren’t done. You have to complete and execute your business plan. If you just complete it, you’ll be like many but not all businesses. You’ll have a business plan. If you execute the plan, you will be among those highly successful businesses that both complete and execute their business plan. Given the survival rate of businesses in the US, when you complete and execute your business plan, you can find yourself in that group of businesses with long term sustainable survival and growth.
How do you complete and execute your business plan?
It all starts with assembling your plan into a single document. I generally like things that are simple. I recommend using a single-column table. Mine would look like this:
Each section title is its own row and a second row contains the information you developed in each of the steps. Your Simple Business Plan could fit on one or two sides of a single piece of paper.
You’ve developed and completed your plan; now you have to use it. That means executing your plan. Do Not Procrastinate!
A significant part of executing this plan involves delegation and trust. You must not only trust yourself; you must also trust those who are on the team. If you are the only person on the Team, then trusting yourself means developing self-confidence. You cannot micro-manage or refuse to allow others to actively lead and participate; doing so will result in failure. Strategy execution is an important step and skill.
Your guide will start with the Mission/Vision/Values statements. This is what you are about, where you are going, and how you will get there. Each of the next two steps involves ensuring you are focusing on the market you identified, not spreading yourself across everything in search of revenue and ensuring that you have the right people (or help if you are a sole person company) to execute your strategy.
Getting the information to measure your results (Scorecard) and then using that data to celebrate success or make necessary adjustments. The final step is using your defined processes to produce or deliver your product or services. Follow the steps and ensure everyone else does too. If outcomes are not as you would like, use the steps to find where the issue is occurring. Fix the cause, not the symptom. The odds are if something goes wrong it is a step in your process and not the entire process.
Executing your Business Plan is a crucial step. Without execution, your plan is nothing more than words on paper. Failure to execute is the single greatest cause of business failure. Don’t fall into that.
The Series So Far:
The Simple Business Plan – Mission, Vision, and Values
The Simple Business Plan – Marketing Strategy
The Simple Business Plan – People