Okay – this is going to be controversial. I don’t think you should prepare future strategies or invest in business planning services until you’ve started changing how you do business.
What? Isn’t that putting the horse before the cart? And doesn’t your website say you offer business planning services?
And yes, I do – I am a huge advocate of business planning, but I don’t think it’s the first step in the process.
The Same Old, Same Old
Most business planning services involve getting all the leadership team into a room for a day (or the worse option is just the business owner does it) – getting all hyped up about your long-term vision, mission etc. Then, planning, strategising & coming up with a beautiful plan that you’re all (or the business owner is) super excited about.
And then you go back into the office & the usual firefighting & BAU (business as usual) completely takes over & all that ‘business planning’ goes into the back burner.
And I’ve been guilty of it. When I used to work with family businesses & privately owned businesses, through The Icehouse, we’d do exactly that.
We’d take an established business owner & their leadership team off-site, talk about the future, get them motivated with some agreed Vision, Mission, Goals & Targets & then we’d send them back into their established business, hoping they’d be able to do something with it.
But the reality is that they usually get caught back up in all of the stuff that stopped them from working ON the business & so it would all fall by the wayside & they would rarely get to realise that vision or plan.
Thankfully, I discovered EOS & although non of the concepts are new, the proven process that they apply is.
Out With The Old, In With The New
On our first day together with the business owner & leadership team to undertake business planning, we don’t dive into long-term vision & mission & values.
Instead, we teach you some simple, pragmatic tools that help you fundamentally change the way you run your business.
Then we give you some time to practise these tools until you get some traction.
Once you have this traction, we get back together again & then (& only then) do we start to look at your core values, your core focus, your 10-year target, your marketing strategy & your 3-year picture – all the things that make up your Vision.
And there’s a method in our madness. Through working with over 15,000 businesses, we know that this is how we can get results.
Change the way that you work first & then work on the Vision & Values.
Because the reality is that these already exist, even if only in your head, it’s how you are doing business that needs to change first.
That’s turning business planning on its head!
The simplicity of the EOS Tools is that they help good companies run better. EOS has been proven to help thousands of entrepreneurs to clarify their vision, build healthy teams & gain traction in their organisations.
EOS is simple, but fundamentally changing how a business operates can be hard. So if you love what you’ve read here & would like to know more about implementing these tools such as business planning services into your company in the most effective way possible, I would be happy to chat with you about how I can guide you & your leadership team through the EOS Process.
Just visit me at EOS worldwide, where you can book a meeting with me or download the EOS tools, including the 2-page strategic business plan:
