For small business – this doesn’t seem obvious at first.

You need to become successful and profitable NOW, not next year, and definately not ‘one-day’.

You need to make the hard decisions, make the big changes, and have your success now.

If you wait, and go slow, your life will dribble away, and your business will just be wasting your time.

So when you are planning – move the horizon to something closer, make it immediate.

A lot of this depends on the owner of the business to implement, and its the old “work in the business, versus working on the business’. I think you need 30%-60% of your time spent working ‘on the business’ – being planning strategy, marketing, and working with partners etc.

If you are a public company, you have shareholders demanding profit this year, so generally there is a mandate to get things done. If you are privately owned, you can just wonder around, with little or no growth if you don’t get stuck into the changes now.

Google talks about velocity of business.

If its worth doing, is worth planning,
if its worth planning its worth doing,
if its worth doing its worth doing NOW.

Bring those plans sooner and faster. Bring the profit NOW.

In order to achieve sooner and faster you need:
- time – reorganise your time to work on the business (see above)
- skills – for planning growth, marketing, branding, sales – perhaps outsource some of this
- motivation / inspiration

If you need motivation / inspiration, read these :

Think Big – Donald Trump

Think 10x – Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

Be passionate – Charles Kovess

Two of these guys above I wrote about here

“we need a new website, we need a CRM. Our last 3 web sites didn’t work – we need a better one.”

If you are thinking about marketing tactics – then that is the mistake.

If you don’t have a bigger vision, and an understanding of why you are investing in each marketing tactic, then you WILL fail.

If you can’t clearly and distrinctly describe the aims of your website, the branding it needs to promote, what interactions you want to promote. Then your screwed.

You need to take a step make, and to some marketing strategy, as opposed to planning/investing in marketing tactics.

Lots of small business owners want to see action, and don’t value sitting around talking, and strategizing. The only problem, that’s exactly what you need to be doing.

Now I know these sound contrite – but here is a starter of documents you need to consider.

Mission Statement
Vision Statement
Benefit Statement
Positioning Statement
Value Proposition
Unique Sales Proposition
Strategic Differentiation Statement
Brand
Brand Promise
Brand Identity

Now imagine you went to your web developer, or marketing planner, and said please read through these. We need your input on a new website that better supports our vision/brand/value to the market. We want to website to help us better interact with new prospects.

You and the website developer now have a shared understanding of what you are attempting to achieve. You can at least converse based on this understanding.

And when they do come up with website concepts, and ask you about the AI. All you have to do is judge it on how it meets your stated goals – not does it look cool.

So the next time someone is talking about redoing a website, or new brochures, or change the tele marketing tacticts. And the DONT give you some idea of the vision/branding/value – then DANGER WILL ROBINSON !