Posts tagged planning

Did you plan for COVID?

Business Coaching Business Consulting Change Management Leadership Meandering Genius Promotion Tuesday Strategic Planning Stuff Tips May 19, 2020

Pre-COVID. Boss to Employee: “We don’t have time to plan right now — we need to get work done.

Post-COVID. Boss to employee: “We need to plan right now, or we won’t have any work to get done.

Planning…

That must be one of the scariest words in the Business Dictionary.

Why?

Because, so many shy away from it.

By this Friday, we are expecting it to start raining here in San Antonio TX. It’s forecasted to rain for the next seven days.

That means flooding.

I turned to my wife last night, after looking that the weather report, and said, “We’ll need to get the Flooding Checklist out.”

Is just one of our ‘plans’ that makes sure we are as prepared for the worst as possible.

You do that when you run a business. Ours is a 100-acre horse farm with 40 horses on property.

We didn’t have a “Pandemic Checklist.”

But, almost three months ago, we did pull out our Disaster Preparedness Plan and developed a list of actions.

These actions kept our business moving forward and helped since I was laid off on April 20th.

Did you plan for COVID?

Were you ready for COVID?

What are you doing Right Now about planning for the next crisis.

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants
#planning

Contingency Planning

Business Coaching Business Consulting Change Management Innovation Leadership Life Meandering Genius Start-up Saturday Strategic Communication Strategic Planning Tips March 28, 2020

How important is disaster and contingency planning for your business … now? 

In 2016, my wife and I opened our horse farm. We also started an equitherapy-for-vets nonprofit.

One of the requirements for accreditation of the nonprofit was to establish contingency plans to mitigate potential risks.

After 21 years in the military and 7 years as a war planner, I fully understood the importance on risk mitigation through disaster and contingency planning.

Even though we’re a small business, we have plans in place for Flooding, Freeze, and Fire. The Flooding and Freeze plans have been used every year since we opened.

We never imagined that Pandemic would be on the list!

However, what we found is that we were able to pull out our plans and were able to quickly pull key aspects of the existing plans to create a quick response to deal with this crisis.

Did your business have any formal contingency plans going into this? Have you ever considered business risks and devised mitigation strategies.

No one could have planned for a Pandemic, except maybe the World Health Organization. However, planning is still quite important.

If you don’t have any contingency planning, what are you going to do about it today?

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants

Reset Your Funk!

Business Coaching Business Consulting Change Management Innovation Meandering Genius Organizational Commitment Overcoming Organizational Myopia Performance Measurement Stuff Take A Leap Wednesday May 29, 2019

Ever have one of those days where you feel in a funk and, regardless of what you’ve got done, you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything?

You don’t want to carry that feeling and funk into tomorrow.

How you you hit the reset button and start out a new day with a positive outlook on the rest of the week?

Do You Have A Business Plan

Business Consulting In Your Face Friday Meandering Genius Strategic Planning March 1, 2019

Two thirds of all small businesses do not have a plan (according to a recent survey). However, I believe that number is much higher!

Are you an entrepreneur? Run your own business, even if it’s as a realtor, having a side hustle, or pushing a MLM product? Do you have a written business plan? I’ll bet 9 times out of 10, the answer is, “No.”

Those that actually have a written business plan, when was the last time you looked at it? When was the last time you updated it? When was that last time you used it to drive business decisions? Again, 9 times out if 10 the answer will probably be, “Never.”

Small businesses are twice as likely to succeed when they have a business plan. If it’s a well designed plan, and not something filled in off the internet, the likelyhood significantly increases!

A well designed business plan, built by someone that knows what they’re doing, costs very little. Especially, when you consider the amount of money and time you spend to start and run your business–why would you not invest just a little to increase your likelihood of success two or more times?

Do you have your own business–what is it?
Do you have a business plan?
Do you use your plan?

Look Before You Leap

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Strategic Planning Take A Leap Wednesday February 27, 2019

Has anyone ever told you to, “Look before you leap?” If you’re thinking about leaping into a new small business, look before you leap means, create a plan.

Many businesses fail in four years and most fail in ten. There are many reasons why they fail, but the root cause is that they don’t have a good (or any) written plan.

Too often, small business owners think a plan is for getting a loan or an investor. They download a typical business plan template from the internet and fill it out. This is not the purpose of planning and isn’t what lenders are looking for. They want to see that you have thought through your business strategy and have a good implementation approach.

Also, many businesses think they build the plan once and leave it alone after that. A plan should be a living document, annually updated, and quarterly reviewed to ensure you’re on track.

New businesses should create a “Strategic Business Plan.” This contains the typical business plan items a lender looks for, but also overcomes the five reasons 70% of all plans fail. These plans are accompanied by a current “Annual Operational Implementation Plan,” which outlines steps for the year to make the business successful.

Have you looked before you leaped?

Positive Thinking

Life Meandering Genius Stuff Success Sunday February 17, 2019

I don’t know how many of you have ever played golf. I personally love the sport.

It’s just you and the course.

It’s also the kind of activity that will really mess with your head if you let it. Golf is all about positive thinking.

In golf, like everything in life, it is important to visualize your success. Good golfers have a routine that includes standing behind the ball. The really good golfers aren’t just lining up their shot; they’re visualizing their shot. They’re picturing, in their mind, the ball’s flight through the air, where it will land, and the course it will take prior to coming to rest.

This is positive thinking at work. The positive thinking book, The Secret, is based on the belief of the law of attraction, which says that thoughts can change a person’s life directly. If you learn to harness the power of positive thoughts, you’ll attract more positive circumstances.

Misery Loves Company – Like Attracts Like

We spend too little time appreciating our joy and the joy of others. We tend to believe that thinking positively and being happy is not a habit. You need to rewire your brain with the power of positive thinking. Gratitude makes us happier. It floods our brains with dopamine, the chemical that has the potential to drown out our negative thoughts and anxious feelings we carry throughout the day. Gratitude invokes the law of attraction.

Throughout this week, I encourage you to take the opportunity to show your gratitude to others at least once a day. Practice your own positive thinking and visualize your week of encouraging the success of others every day. Whether it’s your family, friends, or co-workers, make an effort to recognize them for what they do.

Why Do You Do What You Do?

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Speaking Strategic Planning August 5, 2017

Many people start their own business for a variety of reasons: extra income, want to be their own boss, freedom of when and when not to work, stay at home parent, and a whole host of other reasons. However, many of these businesses fail over time, often because the owner didn’t document, follow, and constantly update a strategic business plan. The often overlooked and seldom thought about aspects of any strategic and business plan, is deep down, why you’re doing what you’re doing and where you want it to go — the mission and vision. Sure, many companies have an idea and even some of them they write it down. But, how good are these statements for your company?

Join John Knotts, a strategic business advisor with over 25 years’ experience working with companies of all sizes to improve their business operations. The first questions he asks in any engagement are: what do you do, why do you do it, where are you today, and where are you going. These questions begin to form, what he calls, the ‘Strategic Bridge’, a visual representation of your strategy at work.

Bring your current mission and vision statements for you company and let’s examine, along with John, what you do and why you do it.

Bulverde Spring Branch Business Networking
Friday, August 18, 2017, 8:45 am
St. Paul Lutheran Church of Bulverde (The Red Roof Church)
29797 US-281, Bulverde TX 78163
Free to attend

Fix Your Roof When the Sun is Shining

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Process Improvement Strategic Planning April 25, 2015

Lisa Hershman, Denovo Group, has a phrase, “We never fix the roof when the sun is shining.”

I don’t know if I really need to explain the saying, but often businesses wait until stuff goes wrong to try to fix it. Then, it becomes an emergency break fix and it is done poorly because they lack sufficient time to really solve the problem.

The thing is, in business, fixing things when the sun is shining applies to everything. This basically means fixing things that really are not broken.

Off the top of my head, here are a few items that we neglect until it is too late and then do wrong because we are hard-pressed to simply get it done.

Planning. Strategic, operational, and even tactical planning, we are tremendously poor at in business, but specifically strategic planning is often overlooked. All too often, businesses look to strategic planning when they are having significant problems and they think it will solve their problems (the proverbial silver bullet). The problem is that strategic planning is a long range effort (hence strategic) and not designed to solve tactical problems.

Process improvement. All too often businesses let shoddy processes continue as the company grows and they ignore things like defects, poor customer service, and excessive process variance until too late. Then, when everything related to the process is falling apart, suddenly the business tries to solve the problems that took years to manifest in the process. What is worse, all too often all of the business processes are in the same state of disrepair and instead of just fixing one process, the business tries to create a full blown process organization and expect it to happen overnight.

Development. Businesses often look to training to solve a problem, but do not look at development when there isn’t a problem. If you are considering going into a leadership position, this is when you start learning about leadership, not six years after becoming a leader and you suck at it. However, we get very tactical when it comes to solving problems with training as the solution.

These are just a few examples of how businesses become very reactive to things and treat everything as a fire fighter versus a fire marshal. Living the advice of Lisa Hershman is very important for all of us.

Incorporating Scenario Planning into Your Planning Offsite

Strategic Planning Think Big May 24, 2014

Strategic planning, as a structured and systematic process, is successful when it is leader-led and overcomes the five reasons 70% of all strategies fail. Learn how to see your plan through to success. The strategic planning process is where leaders of an organization establish the vision of the organization’s future and then develop and implement the actions necessary to achieve that future. This article expands on the strategic planning concepts addressed in Think Big, Take Small Steps and is designed to help you achieve success in your strategic planning process.

Several weeks ago, I talked about Application of Scenario Planning in Strategic Planning. Then, we discussed the actual building of the potential scenarios to address possible future occurrences. Now, in the Facilitation of an Effective Strategic Plan Offsite, we use scenario planning to generate potential ideas around what an organization should strategically consider.

Let me provide you with an example of a scenario that I used before with military privatized housing.

First, you should develop three to five scenarios that address potential concerns that you identified in the blogs covering How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment. Review them with the senior person you are working with and narrow these down to three. Any more probably is too much.

We’re not talking about aliens landing and capturing market share…focus on potential future events that are based in reality. if you look at the above example, this proved to be a very possible event and raised concerns that the military determined to strategically deal with.

There are two ways to primarily address a scenario. The example above provide the first way and that is to point out a potential vulnerability in current operations allowing the senior leadership to discuss and determine potential ways to mitigate the strategic risk. If the organization already has a mission, vision, and goals, I like to provide scenarios that challenge their current strategy and have them determine if the strategy is still valid or does it need to be changed.

Either way, these are used to promote discussion, which leads eventually action items that I talked about last blog in Building a Strategic Plan from the Bottom Up.

My recommendation is that you have fun with the scenarios, but be realistic. I have found that senior leadership enjoy thinking about the strategic what ifs and discussing them. You just don’t want to do this too much during your offsite, or overuse the approach because the leaders will wonder if the plan is being built off reality or fiction.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.