Blimey, you’re still here? So, reasons 1, 2, or 3 haven’t rung a bell and you’re still thinking about starting a plan.
If you really don’t want to, maybe reason 4 will help.
Reason 4. You don’t want to choose
One thing that everyone ends up doing is a SWOT. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis. The reason everyone does a SWOT is that when done well (and they often aren’t) it’s a great tool for assessing markets and your business.
The issue with SWOTs, though, is that they’re also a great tool for generating lists. Very long lists. Usually several flip-charts-worth of lists. These get proudly pinned up on someone’s wall, probably as reassurance: “Look everyone, we did a SWOT! It’s all going to be OK!”.
The SWOT stays on the wall, the flip-chart paper gradually yellowing over time. And the business carries on as before. Or maybe the business is doing something, but that thing has no relationship to anything on the SWOT.
SWOT lists are overwhelming. There’s no way your business can address everything all in one go. I have never worked in or with a business (big or small) where they have the resources to attack every issue all at once. And so the big list is seen as too difficult to address, and the SWOT becomes redundant.
If you do a SWOT, and you must, you have to be prepared to prioritise that list.
Go through the issues and work out which ones absolutely have to be sorted out now. Which opportunities come first? Which problems? Ideally you should identify which three to five things the business is going to focus on.
This usually means some tough decisions. Pet ideas need to be dropped. “Nice to have” and “interesting” ideas which don’t make the cut must be shelved. This process in itself can be the most useful thing you can do, resolving tensions and arguments that have been festering in the business for years.
Having someone independent mediate these discussions can be invaluable, as it stops the HiPPO* effect where the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion often overrides useful discussion.
Just working out the criteria for prioritisation can reveal a lot about your business.
If you aren’t prepared to have these discussions, you probably shouldn’t bother with a business plan.
See you next week for our final reason not to write a plan.
*The term, the HiPPO effect was probably first used by Avinash Kaushik in 2007 in his book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day"
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