Many business experts often place an importance on creating and defining business plans. It is often said that we need business plan, which includes all details such as mission statements, SWOT analysis, sales forecasts, revenue model, budget and others. However, spending too much time tinkering with our business plan could also be considered as procrastination, because we delay doing something directly related to core activities of our business. If we are certain about our “bright ideas”, then it is important to get the ball rolling. However, thinking and working too much with business plans could actually stop us from getting started. It is actually a good idea to initially skip business plan and consider working directly with core activities. By understanding all things related to operational functions, we should be able create better business plans.
In fact, we may need to face and address unforeseen hurdles and barriers, before we create business plans. Before we are getting started with business plan, we should make sure that we have a mature idea. This should help us to effectively save ourselves time and effort by discovering all the flaws associated with our ideas. Once we have started scrutinizing and pinpointing these hurdles, it should be easy to find solutions and include them in business plans. There’s also a possibility that our plan will only complicate things. A plan could flood our mind with many fantastic small ideas that can make it overwhelming. It may not be a good idea to add too many bells and whistles. Before we have even started, we could think like a complex global conglomerate, instead of concentrating on simple ideas.
A business plan is actually our mind trying to look for ways to effectively get started. It could be because of the fear of failures and fear of not knowing what to do. We should consider a business plan as a failure if it can’t motivate us to pursue our idea. Our motivation is actually already existent before we start our business and bad plan could destroy that motivation if it restricts us from doing the right things. Nothing is considered constant in the business world. Our direction and plan should continuously adapt to the external and internal forces. We should be extremely flexible and have the ability to change and adapt quickly. After finding what’s working in the real world, then it is a good idea to create a business plan. It can be an utter waste of time to create and implement business plans, based on assumptions instead of real life experiences.
Detailed and accurate plan is great, but it can be nearly impossible to create one when we are starting out. It can only be created after we have tried our idea and see how it works in real world. It’s essential for us to go out and polish our ideas to determine what we should include in our final business plan. A plan can be only a few pages long, but it is acceptable if based on real-world situations. Creating proper plans takes effort and time.