Small Business Success – Intention or Evolution?

The big question is: Do small businesses succeed normally as the result of deliberate intention or through an accident of evolution? What do you think?

Often when I ask business owners what business success means for them, they come up with vague answers, or no answer at all. They have never given consideration to how their business would look in its ideal state. They have never defined or designed what success would look like.

No wonder so many small and medium-sized businesses never achieve the success they could. They are never designed to be successful. Most small businesses evolve without intention. They just shift from one state to the next without any real plan, mostly as a reaction to the pressures that develop at the various stages of business growth. The question is: How are you approaching the future of your business?

Business growth phases are quite predictable, but they seem to continually take business owners by surprise. Without proper planning, businesses just bump into the next growth hurdle totally unprepared, instead of preparing the way through or over the hurdle which will inevitably be reached. There is no need for you to allow this to happen in your business.

One prerequisite for small business success is to undertake a business planning process that designs the ideal state of the business and develops an action plan to put in place the appropriate strategies and tactics to create success by intent. Part of this process involves identifying the situation the business is currently in and designing strategies and tactics to smooth the progress from one growth stage to the next.

However, the process of business planning is one of which business owners and managers, even in larger businesses, rarely derive much value. The truth is that the great majority of plans, after they are written, spend their lives on top of a filing cabinet gathering dust. Even if a plan is written, it rarely creates any change or adds value to the business. The main problem here is not with the concept of business planning, but with poor execution.

However, when you follow an effective planning process with the intention of creating real success, it creates incredible results. This process is spelled out in my book, Put Your Business on Autopilot. Business planning is a difficult process to perform effectively and it is not something that should be done without expert assistance. Even many so-called experts get this wrong. That’s why many of our clients take advantage of our expertise in creating business plans that work. The first step is to start analysing your current situation.