You don’t need a business plan until you have worked out how to be valuable and successful!

The business community is often besotted by the need for plans, insisting that this activity is the platform for success. It isn’t, and in fact the planning process is just about the final throw of the dice in the pursuit of better performance. Even in small business, owners will invite business coaches to help business development, which I agree with and indeed I provide such a service myself…but guess what most ‘coaches’ suggest as the first course of action? Business plans, that’s what. I think this pressure is exerted on small business owners for two reasons: one is that smaller organizations tend to operate without plans, and two is that business coaches see the creation of business plans as a way to display their own ‘coaching’ competence.

To take an extreme case, imagine that a budding comedian invited a business coach to help develop his business as a full time entertainer. The first things that the comedian needs to learn are how to create consistently good, unique material, and how to deliver the material in a very funny way. If these two most critical aspects of his ‘business’ are not up to scratch, having a business plan will only ensure that he becomes an organised failure. With this simple and obvious example in mind, what are the two things that business people need to do to run a successful enterprise? The first is to create consistently distinctive and valuable offerings for the market, supported by the ability to sell the offerings in a seductive and productive manner. Naturally, beyond these imperatives, there will be a need to ensure that service and internal teamwork is excellent, etc. Then, if the business creates high levels of demand, a business plan will be a vital way to control objectives, activities and results.

Most big companies are better at planning than being compelling with customers. I recently asked managers and sales people from a large company to make notes on what they thought was different and much better about what they offered and sold…compared to what their rivals presented.

First of all, every response centred around the products and service they offered, all of which was very similar to competitive ‘claims’…and every response involved a vastly different explanation, in terms of what was mentioned first, last, etc. In short, the team had nothing interesting to say, and they said it in very disinteresting, disjointed ways. You will perhaps recall the tragic line from the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred’. In business we could replace this with ‘Into the valley of dearth strode the sales people with nothing valuable to offer’, because there is a massive dearth of ideas at market level…and instead of offering ideas, companies send their sales people to a certain commercial death by offering products and service, and nothing more.

If I am the target of financial planners I want someone to offer me super ideas, not just super, so that my wife and I enter the future with safety and success. If I am the target of marketing companies, I want someone to offer me ideas to ensure improved results in key areas of my business…not just advertising avenues that cost money. If I am the target of banks, I want someone to offer ideas that will help us to manage our finances successfully…not just a range of finance products, which I can get anywhere, any time. These ‘wants’ belong to everyone, in every market, however people don’t express such desires because they have been conditioned to expect stories about predictable products and conventional claims about service. Accordingly, these wants are now needs.

The first kind of plan then that is needed by organizations and their sales people is one that ‘aims’ to show what markets really need…supported by compelling propositions that satisfy customers, rather than to just pacify them. The second kind of plan is one that commits the company and its sales team to be active in selling success, and in achieving success. One form of success without the other represents pain, not a plan. If you aim to travel to a new destination, you will need a plan, and so the question is ‘where are you aiming to go this year?’