Failure to plan is planning to fail

Having a plan for your business is necessary despite what many new start-up evangelists may say. No truer words on this than from Winston Churchill “Failure to plan is planning to fail”.

Flying by the seat of our pants is a high energy ride that usually ends in a crash. By making a plan, however brief gives us a path to follow. Your plan should have at least a starting point, an end (goal) and path that will lead you there. This means each day when you get up and get to work on your bootstrapped idea or start-up you know what you must do. A saying that I despised working for my first real start-up company BOZII which I have now came to love is “If it’s not on the plan, don’t do it”. The founders would ask each other every time one of us had an idea “is it in the plan?” Most people in the business were very entrepreneurial and so we had an idea a day easily. I recall one time while the MD was away we started a whole new consumer brand to the business, by the time he got back we had the branding done and the website was just going live. Five words later and it was scrapped “is it in the plan?”.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be rigid in your thinking. The plan is merely a guide to keep you on track. Plans can be changed and added to or even diverted altogether. But by going back to your plan and reviewing you goals you can ask yourself if your latest pivot idea is going to get you there.