Many times in our life, when we want to make something big, we spend many times planning how everything will work. Either your next vacations or your next business, before carrying it out is recommendable to organize your ideas in order to have everything clear and be ready to work on it.

The planning process is essential if you want to know what to do when things don’t go according to plan.

That’s a great quote that I always remember when I’m planning something. May be it’s obvious, but is good to remember that planning everything before to do something is essential for the thing you want to do. Many people who start making things without goals, end failing and quiting the project because they were not following a path. They never had neither goals to reach nor purposes to keep working, and finally when they get stuck with something, they quit. Ok I have mentioned the word planning many times in this post but what’s the big deal with that? What should you know when you are going to write a business plan?

The Planning Process

In this graph you can see what’s the process of planning suggested by me. First of all, you need to have a vision of the project, defining how everything will operate and how all its elements will be interconnected. So then, defining the mission and goals of your project will help you to keep working the hardest in order to achieve these things. Basically, if you don’t know what do you want to achieve, you will be wasting your time working in something that hasn’t an end…

Study the environment in order to know the market: competitors, consumers… By studying and knowing the competition you will be a step forward of them, so you could develop and offer something better to those people who are using the service or product of your competitors. Once you have analyzed your targeted consumers, determining what they are looking for and what they expect of your service, you will be ready to keep working on your project.

When you want to achieve something, you need to have more than one way to do it. By analyzing and planning different strategies you will have different alternatives in case you fail with one of them. So this could be trial and error, changing of strategy and trying again could be a process of weeks until you get the secret formula, which will give you the highest conversion rates, sales, etc.

After that, once you have analyzed some strategies, analyze their risk. Which one can make you lose more money? Which one can make you lose in front of your competition? All that kind of questions are studied in this phase, and answering them can help you to choose and implement a strategy.

Great! You have selected a strategy but now, it’s time to run your plan! That’s right, now you have to materialize all your efforts in something that you can feel proud of. It would be great for you to see that you didn’t spend time planning the project in vain, and to see how everything is working as you thought and planned before.

Everything will be working fine, everything is pretty and you will feel happy… for a while. Since the first minute your project’s life, you need to start tracking everything in order to analyze and see if going well, if you are not wasting money/time or if the consumers are doing what you expected… So it’s time to analyze the results.

No matter what’s the result, if your business is going well or bad, you need to optimize it. This is a critical phase because of it will depend the life of your project. Find the way to improve the experience of the consumer with your service or product, find how to make them stick to you and keep them using what you offer them.

The Loop

As you can see on the graph, once you are in the bottom of the chain you need to go back to the beginning. In the phase of optimization, you can improve the current strategy or look for another one. No matter what you choose to do, you need to evaluate the risk of the future changes you want to do in order to have everything under control.

I don’t guarantee anything, but if do everything well following that scheme, it would be hard to fail on what you do. Perhaps this is a very simple and general scheme, is good to have an idea of what you need to do when you want to plan something. Also, depending of the business, you should add more phases to that scheme to complement the current phases.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to recommend you to take your time and don’t put yourself under pressure, try to define some milestones and deadlines for the project, and stick to them. If you cannot meet your deadlines, give you a second chance and extend them, but always have a top. This will motivate you to work the hardest.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

-Leonard Bernstein