Strategic Planning: Would You Rather be Comfortable or Profitable?

Some people think change means you were doing something wrong. You don’t need to change because you are necessarily doing anything wrong, but you do need to change if you want to grow and progress farther than you are now. Change is really the foundation to your future success.

You don’t want to change just for changes sake, but you do want to change so you can get better results than you’re getting now. And that requires planning. It requires clear and focused thought on an intended outcome.

You know what you’re doing now, how you’re doing it, and the outcomes those actions produce. When you look to your future if you want different or better outcomes that will require different and improved actions. Change is difficult for most people because it’s just so much easier to continue to do the things that are comfortable for you.

Yet if you can’t or won’t change it can lead to your failure. As you look to your future and what you want and how you’ll get that consider the roles or functions you handle in your business now, and the roles or functions you will need to take on in the future. Often times it’s more about the roles or functions you will need to have others handle, so you can do what’s most important.

What is the most important thing for you to be spending your time on? What important things do you keep pushing aside never getting to because you’re so busy taking care of activities? If you spent more of your time on those most important things could you be more productive?

It’s crystal clear that if you focus your time and energies on your most important things you’ll be more productive, but quite often those most important things are harder for you to do than the things you’re more comfortable doing. Two very important things that come to mind that will hands down increase your productivity are strategic planning and marketing. But you avoid doing them because you don’t know how to do them well, and you think they’re hard to do.

You may not know how to do them well now, but you can learn. And as you learn you will begin to realize that neither is as hard as you thought they would be. You’ll also recognize their value.

Strategic planning gets you focused on the right things for greater profits. Marketing helps you to get in front of the right people with the right message so they want to know more about doing business with you. Together these planning processes help you to do more with less and get more with less. And that makes you both more profitable and a happier person.