Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up

Business Planning: ActionCOACH

Take the brakes out of a car, and you wouldn’t even get in it, let alone put your foot down. You need the ability to slow down before you can safely speed up.

That’s what planning does for a business.

As a business coach, I often have some version of the same conversation. I ask a business owner: “Do you have a business plan?” “Of course,” they say. Then I ask: “Is it written down?” Long pause. That pause tells you everything. Plenty of people have a plan in their head. I see them a year later, and the plan is still exactly where it was: five years away. Nothing’s moved, because nothing was ever fixed down on paper.

A formula for success

So once a year, I run what I call an ‘Alignment Day’ with clients (two or more days for larger businesses). It’s the most important day of their year and the only acceptable excuses for missing it are that the business is on fire (literally) or someone’s in hospital. On that day we build a plan across four areas.

We start personal, not business: what do you actually want from this? The house, the holiday, the foundation, all costed and dated across one, three and five years. Then we work back to business goals: the turnover, the product lines, the team, the premises needed to fund that life. The business works for you, not you for it.

Next comes an 18-month plan: Post-it notes arranged month-by-month, hire this person, launch that product, open that site. It goes on the wall. You see it every day.

Last is personal development: to get what you want, who do you need to be?

We use a formula: Be × Do = Have.

Most people only ever push the ‘Do’: more hours, more calls, more marketing. However, if you are not changing, then more ‘Do’ does not change anything. Sometimes it’s a course, a book, a better question for your accountant. Small, not dramatic, but deliberate.

Every quarter, we come back for a 90-day plan, one or two priorities per team, no more, worked through with other business owners facing the same problems. You then have a week-by-week plan for the next quarter.

We repeat the whole thing every year, and the goals rarely stay the same size. Hit a target you set 18 months ago, and something shifts; sometimes it was never really about the car. The plan grows with you instead of sitting in a drawer.

None of this requires a coach. It requires discipline, a wall you’re willing to write on and someone willing to keep you accountable to those goals and plans (call it a superpower). The Norfolk businesses I watch stall aren’t short on ambition. They’re short on brakes. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up anywhere.