It’s great to have a business plan. I talk about the benefits of business plans all the time. But there is something even more important than a business plan in the success of your business.
As Peter Drucker said, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” Yep. Plain old-fashioned hard work is what you need to make your small business successful. It’s sad that people are looking for the easy way out. They want to make millions by working only one hour a day, 4 hours a week, from their homes, in their spare times. It won’t happen.
Ask any small business owner how many hours they put in (1) learning their trade, (2) preparing to start, and (3) making sure they succeeded. Success doesn’t happen in just a few hours a week. I worked art-time on my business for six years while I had a full-time job, and it wasn’t until I “retired” and devoted full-time to the business that it has really started to pay off.
What Else Do You Need? If you have put together your business plan and you have financing from a bank, you still need two essentials:
DEMAND. That is, customers ready to buy. You need to either have a few customers “in the bag” or a list of people you can talk to, or you need to have built up excitement about your products or services before opening. You can’t just open and put an ad in the paper and expect people to show up. If you are on the web, you can’t just slap up that website and get on Google, and wait for the orders to come in. If you have a service, you may already have a few clients who are bringing you revenue. But you can’t stop there; you must have more in the pipeline.
SYSTEMS. Systems are the processes you will use to get the orders, deal with order processing, collections, and other issues, and a way to track your success. You need production systems, financial systems, customer systems, operating systems, and on and on. Even the smallest business needs this stuff. For example, if you have products on a website and lots of people wanting your products, how will you process your orders? All of these problems need to be dealt with before you can start a business and be sure you can keep going.
When I started my business, I was selling books. I had to figure out how to get the books delivered fast and not pay a lot for a fulfillment house (I only had two different books to sell and no huge quantities). My Virtual Assistant stocked the books and sent them out. All I had to do was pay postage. If I had not figured out how to do this before I got a bunch of orders, I would have been in trouble.
In other words, you can’t wait until you have your business plan in hand to think about how to get customers and how to deal with all the issues you must deal with. You have to start WAY BEFORE that business plan is ready to go.
Yes, you need to work HARD. You also need to work SMART.
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