One of my favorite movies is Chak De India. In case you have never watched it, I will give you a quick summary:
- Women's Hockey is ridiculed in India.
- The selected national team is non-cohesive. There are infightings.
- A controversial coach is appointed to build the team for the world cup.
- The motley bunch beats the world champions and wins the cup.
At every stage of the movie, the coach has a plan. He deals with both the personality challenges of players and their skill issues.
The movie is sprinkled with some iconic dialogues (the most famous being the 70 minutes). At one stage in the movie, Kabir Khan (the Coach) says "वार करना है तोह सामने वाले के गोल पर नहीं .. सामनेवाले के दिमाग पर करो ... गोल खुद-बा-खुद हो जायेगा"
Look at any profession where the stakes are high, and you will see the team putting together a well-thought-out plan.
- Doctors plan surgeries and treatment strategies
- Architects create plans before breaking ground
- Financial Planners decide on the investments after considering several factors
- Despite flying several miles, a pilot has a plan for every single flight
How comfortable would you be availing the services of any of such professionals if they simply acted on their guts? Yet, many business owners simply do it day in and day out!
Do you have your documented business plan?
In most business failures, the conclusion invariably is that they failed to plan. Don't let that be you and your business. A business plan drastically increases the odds of success in your favor.
Even while what I wrote here is obvious, why do we fail to make a business plan? Here are many reasons why small businesses fail to plan. But, the two topmost for me are:
Small businesses focus on saving money by investing their personal time in all activities.
They rarely differentiate between critical and non-critical tasks. Thus, they have too many trivial things to do. It chokes their bandwidth.
What counts is how we leverage our limited resources to make the most impact. Peter Drucker famously said, "The purpose of a company is to create customers. A business has two and only two basic functions - marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs"
So, first things first, focus on building your marketing plan. I am conducting a 2-Day Workshop in May'22 in Navi-Mumbai. In this workshop, I will handhold the participants and help them build their simple and actionable marketing plan. If you are interested, you can click and pre-register (https://bit.ly/3JK9NnT). I shall email more information about the workshop to you in the coming week.
Subodh
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