30 Sep 2010, Posted by Cris Buckley in Create a Blueprint,Strategy, 3 Comments. Tagged business, change, Create a Blueprint, creative thinking, entrepreneur, starting your own business, Strategy
A Flexible, Creative Business Plan Rocks!
Photo by durdonark
Is your business plan—your blueprint—a nice, neat, little package planned out in detail far into the future? Or does it allow for unforeseen change and possibilities—is it a living, breathing organic thing?
How about building flexibility and innovation into a plan from the beginning? Can we expect and plan for change?
There is wisdom in keeping a plan simple and the structure minimal. It doesn’t need to be detailed out too far into the future. 90-days is good; a year is tops.
I love the article Bob Reiss wrote in Entrepreneur, “Write Your Business Plan in Pencil”. Some of his thoughts:
- The smartest entrepreneurs plan on growing and prepare for change.
- One of the attributes of successful entrepreneurs is flexibility.
- You will probably have to change, amend, modify, scrap or abandon your original business plan altogether.
- Every entrepreneur discovers new opportunities that didn’t appear until there was actually a business up and running.
- Most small business owners he knows never wrote a business plan. He hasn’t in 16 startups!
Michelle at Creative Emergence sees how the principles in improvisation theater can apply to “adapt, create and improvise in the work place.” [flexibility & creativity!]
She says,
“Change inspires new ideas, and that naturally unfolds what’s next.
You adapt as one structure dissipates and
re-organizes into a new structure that expands,
yet includes what was before.”
Or consider the Upstart Smart interview with Alexander Renzi about how he started [me] & goji, the first custom cereal and granola company. Notice how he built in flexibility and creativity!
- “We wanted to have a brand that sort of had legs, not something that would pigeon hole us into cereal.”
- “Once or twice a month, we sort of have a big-picture plan of what we’d like to accomplish and the path that we want to take.”
What ideas can you think of to incorporate flexibility and creativity into a business plan? How important do you think it is to factor these things in? What have you experienced?
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3 Comments
October 1, 2010 10:03 am
Bear Files @evolutionfiles
Cris, I’m no expert on business planning… but with internet presences becoming more critical to long term success, I think that the points you make are also relevant to “internet success” for startups. Before a new website is launched a plan is needed that lays out keywords to be targeted, which social media channels the business will start with, and how content will be created to support the business’s success. Once the website is launched we study the analytics and guess what? We are typically wrong about at least a few assumptions, and that’s where agility/flexibility is needed. Businesses and markets will inevitably change, and business plans, marketing plans as well as the business’s website need to be built flexibly to track with those changes.
October 01 2010 12:01 pm
Cris Buckley
Bear, thanks so much! This is fascinating insight into website planning for startups--I really appreciate you sharing your expertise here for all of us (and especially ME!) I'm glad you added the word "agility" to flexibility. Makes me imagine being light on our feet so we can "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee"! :)
October 3, 2010 12:32 am
Tom Graves / Tetradian » A week in Tweets: 26 September – 2 October 2010
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