We’ve all seen people with what looks like a proper business plan, beautifully formatted, twenty or thirty pages long, no spelling mistakes, colour diagrams, detailed descriptions of things that don’t exist yet, but might one day.
That might be a proper business plan that might impress a prospective investor or a bank manager, but it won’t help you build a real business.
For that you need a real plan.
The value capture machine has told you what you’re going to do, for whom, and how and why you’re going to do it. We’ve discussed all that: you’re going to create value and capture some, and convert the process of doing that into a machine.
Now you need to know when all this is going to get done, and who is going to do it. That’s a real plan: a plan of action.
For every single thing you need to do, work out all the individual tasks within it, and schedule a deadline for them. You may end up with a very, very long to do list.., and that’s great.
You need to know what you need to do, and you need to know who is going to do them, and when they’re going to do it.
Here are two quick tips.
One: You might find it useful to set this up in a spreadsheet software programme, such as excel or sheets. You can put tasks down the left-hand side and dates across the top, so you can track not only when the task should be completed, but how long it will take, so you can track when it needs to start.
Using a spreadsheet may help because it both helps you track the time each task takes, and how they can be sequenced, but also because it can enable you to stack up a huge number of tasks, and keep manage that list as it grows.
Two. Start at the end. You might want to start at the beginning, with first things first, but also check back from the end. If you think about what you want to achieve by a particular date, then you can work backwards from those dates to see if it is even possible to achieve. If it isn’t, then something needs to change in your plan. Even if it is, it will also make you aware of how much spare time you have built into the plan, and how far behind schedule can afford to get.
Yes, what you now have is a schedule, but if you don’t have a schedule, you don’t really have a plan. You really only have written down dreams. By writing a schedule for when your first task must be completed, now you have a real plan.
Create that schedule, decide your first task, set a deadline, and do it.