Your Business
How to Know When to Change Your Business Plan By Tim Berry
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ometimes you need to stick to your business plan to make it work. Even a mediocre strategy consistently executed over time is better than a series of brilliant strategies that keep going off in different directions. Strategy often takes time. On the other hand, there is no virtue in sticking to a plan just for having stuck to a plan. We live with constant change. Which brings me to the dilemma that many business owners face: Do I stick to my plan, or change it? If I change it, then is my plan vs. actual (reality) valid? Doesn’t it take consistent execution to make strategy work?
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I’ve been dealing with this dilemma for years as a business owner, entrepreneur and consultant. I want to suggest some guidelines to help you decide whether to change the plan midstream, or not.
A Good Planning Process It starts with having a plan that includes priorities, milestones and expected results. Also, you have to track results and compare them to what you had planned or expected to see. As you developed those expectations, you should have included assumptions. Ideally you have that process going on already. Without it, there’s no plan to change, and you are managing reactively. If you don’t have a process of planning in place, start it D U C TA L E S
immediately so that you have a better planning process later on.
Stay the Course or Revise the Plan? Take some time each month to review your plan and its results. Once you have the process established, it doesn’t take more than an hour or two to get team members together. Start that monthly meeting with a good hard look at your underlying assumptions. Identify the key assumptions and whether they’ve changed. When assumptions have changed, there is no virtue whatsoever in sticking to the plan you built on top of them. Revise your plan, automatically, when key assumptions have changed. JANUARY • FEBRUARY 2017