Sarah Lakhani Consulting

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planning

Plan versus Action

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Somewhere along your business journey, I’m sure that either you or someone around you has brought up the question of spending time putting a plan together versus taking action and figuring things out along the way.  It seems to be a dichotomy.  But it’s not.  In the question of plan versus action, the truth is simple: there should be a continuous ebb and flow between planning and taking action. 

Entrepreneurs are known for taking quick action, versus traditional corporates where planning, exploring different strategies and ensuring perfection before moving forward is the norm.  But neither extreme is the right way forward.

As entrepreneurs, we often come across the advice to “take messy action”.  And yes, taking action early on is absolutely necessary.  You learn by doing, not by thinking.  You validate your business idea, your product/service, your offer, your marketing, your branding and messaging – all of it – by taking action and gathering feedback.  But that’s not to say that you should take action without thinking things through.  

What goes into planning?

Planning is the first step in your business.  When I talk about planning, I don’t mean to immediately jump into a business plan.  Nor do I mean anything detailed like a content plan.    Initial planning is about getting clarity on your business idea.  Initial planning is getting clear on your vision, the problem you’re solving, how you’re going to solve it, the solution you’re providing, who your ideal customers are, and how you’re going to monetize your idea.  It involves a lot of research and results in capturing your business idea in the structure or framework of a business model.  Again, this won’t be as detailed as after you’ve taken action, but what it does is it allows you to be able to articulate your product or service and create prototypes or beta versions to test and gather feedback on.  

What goes into action?

Once you have your business idea, you absolutely should start testing it.  If you have a product, gather feedback on it by offering some free samples, or a discounted initial price.  If you have a service, begin a beta phase, again either free or at a discounted initial price.  In this phase, you are testing your product or service, gathering as much information and feedback about it, and deciding on the changes you will make to it.  Your changes will include adding, removing, upgrading and downgrading elements of your product or service.  At this point, you will also gather important information on the messaging you will later on use in your marketing.  Once you have made the changes, depending on how big they are, you can either test again or move into your launch.  

The cycle between the two

Often, we’ll find that there is a cycle back and forth between the two, particularly when the product or service being created is highly innovative.  So you’ll do some planning, then move into action, and then go back into planning, then back into action, etc.  The reason this happens is because in each cycle, you’ll make changes that are larger compared to if the product or service had already existed in the market.  You might, however, still want to go through a second round of planning and action, even if your product or service exists, depending on what it is and how many changes you’re making. 

How much time to spend in planning before moving into action

The question of plan versus action is not black and white.  It’s a balancing act that you need to figure out for yourself, your business and your product/service.  And there are several things that will drive where that point of balance is for you.  On top of the questions I suggest below, it’s important to factor in what makes you comfortable.  If you prefer to spend a bit more time in planning, then do it! It’s your business and your decision.  But always check back to make sure you’re not procrastinating because of a hidden fear driven by a mindset block or a limiting belief.  

How innovative is your idea?

The more you’re pushing boundaries, the more you’ll want to get out and test your idea.  This might be a bit counter-intuitive, but the reason behind it is that it’s going to be very difficult to find existing data on a product or service that doesn’t exist.  So if your product or service doesn’t currently exist in the market, then you’ll need to generate that data yourself.  That is why the more innovative your idea is, the more quickly you’ll move onto action.  And in this case, your action will consist of prototyping, testing, collecting feedback, making changes as needed and then re-launching.  And the faster you can get through these, the more quickly you’ll have a product or service that you can sell.  

How many similar businesses are out there (who have already validated your idea)?

If, on the other hand, your product or service exists in some form in the market today (and makes money!), then you will probably spend more time on collecting information that will shape your specific business, your product/service and your offer.  And the reason for that is because data exists.  So instead of having to go out and generate data and feedback yourself, you can easily leverage the information that is already out there.  And you 100% should!   

How much is it going to cost to create or set up?

Another factor to consider is how much your new business venture is going to cost you, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time, resources, and other lost opportunities.  If the cost is high, then you’ll most likely want to make sure you have a solid understanding of your customer needs, struggles, likes and dislikes (with regards to your product or service), the value you are providing and how it’s going to solve the problem that your customer has.  This is, of course, dependent on whether information exists for you to tap into.    

How much time do you have to spend on research and planning before you absolutely must begin bringing in revenue?

Lastly, your planning phase can be stretched out if you already have an existing income stream, are not in a hurry, and would prefer not to hustle and push yourself to get your business idea implemented quickly.  I love to see people spend an allocate amount of time to building their business (or a new revenue stream within their existing business) while still working a 9-to-5 job or delivering their existing products and services.  The great thing about this is that you don’t stress yourself out, you don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed and you don’t burn out.  The flipside, however, is allowing yourself to take too long or never getting it off the ground.  

Plan versus Action

Once you have an idea of where your business idea stands and how much time you should spend on planning before moving into action, you’ll need to figure out just what the planning stage entails and also, what the action stage entails.  So it’s time for you to decide – plan versus action?  How much time should you spend in each phase to generate the highest benefit for you and your business?    

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Make Your Strategy Actionable

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When I worked in a corporate environment, there were two categories of people when it came to strategy – those that were eager to define their strategy, draw up a strategic plan and follow through on it, and those who saw strategy and strategic plans as a “paper exercise”.  The latter felt that working on strategy was a waste of time, mostly because it would take a significant amount of resources (people and time) to put together, and then not much would come out of it in the end.  It wouldn’t be an actionable strategy. People would go back to doing what they used to do, and at most there might be a couple of new things implemented.  But for the most part, nothing would really change.  

Now that I’ve started my own business and I get to work with entrepreneurs and small business owners, I see, well, the same!  And so I’ve been really interested in finding out why some strategy work just hasn’t made a positive impact on the people who requested it.  Here’s what I’ve found.  It’s really just ONE thing.  Your strategy has to be implementable. Otherwise, it really will be a waste of time and effort and won’t change anything in your business.  And, most importantly, after deciding on your strategy, you absolutely should put together a strategic plan that has an outcome that is actionable – something that you can pick up and easily start working towards implementing.  This is so key.  

So how, then, does something as “theoretical” (as one creative entrepreneur called it) as a strategy become something that you can see and touch and action?

The key is to break the strategic plan down into smaller and smaller items, until you have a strategic plan of bite-sized chunks.  But I’m getting ahead of myself here.  Let’s start at the top.

Step 1 – Decide on your strategy

If you haven’t read “What is Strategy”, do that first (it’ll open in a new tab) and then come back here.  The first thing you need to do is decide what makes you different, and use that as the anchor in crafting out your vision, mission and values, your long-term goals, how you’ll compete and who your competitors are, and of course, who your customers are.  Those are the basics.  

Step 2 – Group your strategy into pillars

Now that you know where you want to go, and you can explain who you are and why you’re different, you can start building some strategic pillars.  This is a typical list that you can apply across any business:

  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Products/Services
  • Financials
  • People
  • Operations

Under each of these pillars, begin writing down some action items – things you need to do to get to the goals you set out in Step 1.  

For example, let’s say you run a small Digital Marketing agency.  One of your goals might be to make $500,000 in revenue across all your products and services.  You currently offer two things – project-based digital marketing services and an online digital marketing course.  You split your revenue across the two and decide your targets will be 80% ($400,000) from project-based digital marketing services and 20% ($100,000) from the online digital marketing course.  

You decide to use the pillars suggested above (Sales, Marketing, Products/Services, Financials, People and Operations).  Under Sales, you set a few goals:

  1. 50% of project-based services to come from small/medium businesses 
  2. 50% of project-based services to come from large corporations 
  3. 75% of online digital marketing course to come from large corporations 

You’re doing well.  This is a great start.  You’ll do the same for all your pillars, breaking down each one into no more than 10-12 goals.  Now let’s move on to step 3.  

Step 3 – Break each goal within each pillar into bite-sized actions

This is the part that really makes a difference.  When working on your strategic plan, you need to get to, well, a plan!  I like to create pages for each of the pillars, and then break those pillars down into the goals, which I then break down into action items.  Let’s continue the example above to see what this would look like.

Using the first goal under Sales, “50% of project-based services to come from small/medium businesses”, you can break this down into industries, or even specific businesses you’d like to target.  Let’s do the latter.  When you make this list, bear in mind that not every one will end up generating revenue, so you’ve got to make a big enough list to hit your target.  

  • Organization: F&B Business #1
  • Organization: Health, Beauty & Fitness Business #2
  • Organization: Travel and Lodging Business #3
  • Organization: F&B Business #2
  • Organization: F&B Business #3

Now that you have an idea of exactly who you’d like to target to reach your goal for small/medium businesses, we’ll begin to break this down into actionable steps. Let’s do this for the first business on the list – “Organization: F&B Business #1”.

  1. Follow on instagram
  2. Comment & like posts at least 2x week
  3. Collate ideas of how F&B Business #1 can benefit from digital marketing services
  4. Reach out to Sarah who used to work at F&B Business #1 and ask if she can arrange an introduction
  5. Meet with representative of F&B Business #1 and demonstrate how you can help increase their sales at a low cost
  6. Follow up after the meeting

Your list can stop there for now, and you can add more action items if F&B Business #1 decides to sign you on.  

The idea is to have a strategic plan that is broken down into action items that are easy to do and do not cause overwhelm – because we’ve all been in a position where there’s so much to do that we just don’t know where to start.  This strategic plan makes it easy to know where you should be putting your effort and energy.

How your strategic plan positively impacts your strategy

You created your strategic plan by breaking down your strategy, so naturally you’d expect that the achievement of the action items in your strategic plan will lead to the achievement of your strategy – and you’re right, it should! A little caveat here that if all your leads turn you down, or you can’t get your product to work properly, etc., achievement of the strategy will be unlikely.  But assuming you have a good product/service and that the outcomes of the action items are (mostly) positive, you’ll be able to easily complete the goals within the pillars, which will then lead to achievement of the long-term strategy.  

Strategic Planning Action Time

If you haven’t spent time building your strategy and strategic plan, you should really consider taking some time out of your schedule, perhaps a couple of days, or a whole week, and working through it.  By doing this, you’ll make sure that you and your team spend your time on activities that contribute to your strategic objectives, and essentially, that you don’t waste your time on activities that won’t get you to where you want to go.  

What has your biggest challenge with creating an actionable strategy been? Have you had any great or bad experiences with this? Post your comments and any questions below, and if you can help anyone else out, don’t hesitate to do so! As always, if you’ve found this article useful, share it with someone who’ll benefit from it as well!