Top 7 Reasons To Do A Strategic Plan

As a strategic planning consultant, I hear a lot of reasons why VARs don’t want to spend time creating plans for their companies.

The most popular excuses are, “It takes too long,” ”I don’t have time,” and, “What good is a plan anyway? It will just sit on the shelf collecting dust.” Have you ever heard yourself using these as reasons not to do your own strategic plan?

The fact is, truly successful companies have a plan for what they want and how they are going to get there. Planning doesn’t have to be hard and it doesn’t have to take a week to do.

Here are seven great reasons to carve out a few minutes for strategic planning right now:

1. Without a strategic plan, you will have no idea whether the money you are spending on your business is going in the right places or the wrong places. In other words, you will waste thousands of dollars that could have gone into your pocket!
2. Planning now allows you to relax and just execute the rest of the year. If you spend a little time now on the plan, you can ensure you will make progress on your goal each and every day. Think of a strategic plan like a blueprint: Once you draw it up, your team can go to work building the business you envision.
3. Without a plan you won’t know if you are doing the right things or the wrong things to be successful.
4. Without a plan you can never complete your work because you don’t know where the beginning and end are. With a plan, you can parse out the work for each week and everyone can go home on the weekend confident they completed the right tasks to move the company toward its goals.
5. Without a plan, no one else can help you reach your goals. You are stuck doing it alone. With a plan, your team knows exactly where you are headed and what their role in getting there is.
6. People who write down their goals and plans to achieve them earn, on average, three times more than others who don’t plan.
7. Having a plan will inspire you to accomplish the things that are important to you. Whenever you feel your energy flagging, you can refer to your plan for a boost of energy.

What are you waiting for? Go start planning now!

Laura Posey is chief instigator at Dancing Elephants Achievement Group. Guest blogs such as this one are published regularly, and are part of The VAR Guy’s Business Acceleration InfoCenter.