My favourite take on the quote “No plan survives contact with the enemy”* is from Mike Tyson. Before his rematch with Evander Holyfield in 1997, he said “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Running a small business can feel like this - there’s always someone or something metaphorically smacking you in the face. So what’s the point of writing plans? In our view, not much. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army General and USA President summed it up perfectly. "...I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
Planning = gathering evidence + thinking + problem-solving + scenario planning + prioritising
Plan = writing it up
For small businesses like ours, marketing planning is more helpful than the actual plan. We’ve come across long plans, short plans, detailed plans, bag-of-the-fag-packet plans and everything in between. One thing is common, people spend too little time planning and too much writing it up. Things move so fast that the minute you’ve finished writing it down, it starts to become obsolete.
If you do your planning with energy, enthusiasm, and hustle, it can be done quickly. Find the highest-impact actions that are going to give you the best chance of moving things forward. Do them, then review them.
The plan should fit on a single page.
Here’s our simple guide to effective planning:
Work out what you want to achieve.
Identify how you are going to measure success.
Prioritise which actions to take and what resources you need to make it happen.
Understand how to measure if you are on track.
Start - Do - Review.
Rinse and repeat point 5.
There are more detailed approaches but it doesn’t need to be more complicated than this.
You might need to get your team together and block out a couple of hours, you might be able to do it on your own in 10 minutes. It depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Doing the planning will help, but spending hours writing it up won’t. There’s no point looking at a beautifully crafted presentation while you are getting a surprise poke in the eye. You’re better to know that it might come, be ready to block it and land a couple of jabs yourself.
If this issue resonates and you want some help, drop us a line and we'll take you through some solutions.
*Quote from the Prussian field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke.