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Planning. I’m just not good at it, unless it’s a vacation. I try to look ahead several months, but it never seems to stick. After a few weeks, I generally revert and start working from a “what absolutely needs to happen today” perspective. This is NOT a great way to maximize success.
I don’t think I’m alone. I just finished a call with my Royalty Rewards® Platinum Elite Accountability group. The emphasis of the call was on “re-grouping,” “re-focusing” and “re-setting.” It was a time for all of us to stop, take a step back, see the amazing things we have accomplished and then re-focus.
(As an aside, if you haven’t yet taken advantage of the opportunity to take a Test Drive at one of our Platinum Elite meetings, then I highly recommend you do so. Each meeting is FULL of great ideas, feedback and support. Not to mention a fantastic guest speaker. Our next meeting’s guest speaker will be talking about “Winning the Talent Wars” – finding and keeping staff. You do NOT want to miss this. Call your Coach for more details on how you can join us on October 19th & 20th!)
For me, the pattern is generally like this; things start organized with an excellent plan, well-defined goals and assignments.
However, what happens is pretty much everything but the plan. What gets in the way? Pandemics, unexpected critical equipment failures, staff shortages, natural disasters and the list goes on and on. All of these issues are critical to solve and overcome. It sometimes feels like there is a case to be made that being distracted or losing focus from our original plans are the norm or expected way to operate and NOT the exception.
Plan for the future, understand WHERE you want to go and KNOW what it looks like!
This is NOT to say it’s time to surrender and give in to this seemingly never-ending path of daily distractions and frustrations. But it is a chance to acknowledge that they DO happen, they WILL continue to happen, and we SHOULD plan for them to happen.
Wait?! What am I saying?
I’m saying as leaders we absolutely MUST plan for the future, understand WHERE we want to go and KNOW what it looks like when we get to where we wanted to go. Without this leadership, guidance and vision, our businesses may run well for a while but it’ll slowly degrade until it is unrepairable.
But HOW can we do this AND solve all the small issues that come our way on a daily basis?
Zingerman’s 9th Natural Law of Business is this: Success means you get better problems.
I have had tremendous success in reversing my thought process about all of this. Let me explain. Instead of being annoyed or distracted at the endless stream of unsolicited distractions, I plan for them. I expect and welcome them. You see, if I didn’t have these daily problems to solve, it probably means my business doesn’t exist or that it is about to close. Instead of the daily “fires” being a problem, they indicate that my business is thriving. The problems to solve never go away, they just get better.
So instead of planning for and expecting a full day of perfectly creative business planning, forward thinking and working ON my business, I plan for maybe 2 hours a day. The rest? Dedicating to solving and re-solving all those annoying daily fires that are a result of my success.
What has this allowed me to do?
It has allowed me to make my business BETTER and has given me a chance to actually plan where my business needs to go. You see, each of these “fires” are an opportunity to train staff, to educate, to create better systems and to really understand WHAT you need to be trying to fix, solve and make better. Now THAT’S really good planning.