The media and business community love stories of rapid growth. But this Canadian Business article sheds some light on the downside of overnight success – through interesting examples like Krispy Kreme and Megan Fox.  Turns out that business trends are being adopted – and becoming extinct – faster now than in the past.  A study from Wharton shows that it isn’t the products that are the problem – it’s the speed with which they grow. The study found that once something reaches a certain level of popularity, people no longer want to be identified with it. They’re happy to join when it’s on the upswing, but loathe to do so on the other side of the curve.

The message for business: don’t turn your good product into a trendy item that may have a great ride up, just for the glory of it – because it may mean an unnecessary and untimely ride down.

98% of venture capital firms say that business plans play an Important or Somewhat Important role when they look at new ventures (according to a study recently published in the Canadian Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship).

What’s even more important than the business plan document, though, is the business planning process. I have seen many companies come to new and important realizations about the key success factors and obstacles for their concepts by working through the business planning process, by conducting good research, and by projecting financials.  They make smarter decisions faster and more cost-effectively through business planning than they would by launching and trying things out.

So while a business plan is incredibly important, it’s the process, not the outcome, that matters most.

Yesterday we did a Growth Strategy Session with an entrepreneur who has a very successful business in the fashion industry.  She’s spent the last 12 years building up a brand, reputation, and enviable client base. But now she’s bored!  She’s mastered what she does and is looking for a new challenge.  The problem – she’s identified 4 different opportunities for growth and can’t decide which one to pursue (she’s smart and experienced enough to know that she can’t take on all 4).  We see this problem with a lot of early-stage companies and entrepreneurs: too many opportunities and no focus, which results in resources being spread too thin and no success in any area.

Here’s what we did to help get clarity on which opportunity to say YES! to, and which to say NO to.

a)      Define goals.  For the fashion industry CEO, it was the classic entrepreneur goals: autonomy, impact, challenge, flexibility, decent financial income, and the ability to build an asset that is one day saleable.

Whatever your goals, everything you pursue has to start here.

So lay out your goals and constantly refer back to them when evaluating opportunities.

b)      Define each of the opportunities.

1. What is the business concept?
2. Who is the target market?
3. Why do they need it / why will they buy it / what’s the value to them?
4. What will it take (time, money, people) to deliver the concept
5. What are the economics of the concept
   • Revenues minus Costs equals Profits

You may not have all the answers to economics question – that’s ok, do a thumbnail, highlight what numbers you’re least certain about, and do follow up research if you need to validate your numbers

c)       Evaluate the opportunities relative to your goals.

Last night, of the CEO’s four opportunities, it quickly became clear that 2 would be a huge amount of work, for meager returns.  It was easy to toss these out.  A third offered reasonable potential returns, but the risk of it not working out was high.  The fourth looks very exciting.  It is clearly differentiated, the market opportunity is strong, the company is in a unique position to be able to deliver it.

This was a great process for the CEO.  She had come into the session with a ‘gut feel’ that the opportunity we eventually identified as best was the best, but she didn’t have any way to articulate that or quantify it.  And that’s a challenge in the business world:  intuition is valuable, but even more so when you’ve gone through a process to validate it.

So the next step is to figure out the steps to pursue that opportunity.  This is where the CEO wanted to be all along, but before we went through this process, she didn’t have the ability to commit to this one opportunity and throw her all into it.  Now she does!

If your organization faces numerous opportunities, I encourage you to go through this kind of process to winnow the ones that aren’t worth your while, and to help you give it your all to the ones that do.

I have, at what sometimes can be coined as an annoying habit – I like to plan. From the simple, to the most complex tasks I put a plan I place: ‘what to wear to work for the week’, ‘how my family should spend their Saturday’, ‘how to develop the requirements for a National branch desktop application’. I do not discriminate by size or complexity of the task. This simple habit has transcended every aspect of my life and is in turn one of the reasons, I believe, the multimillion dollar projects I’ve managed in my professional career have done well despite numerous obstacles. Because, at the heart of a good ‘strategy’, is great execution. Your plan is part of the foundation of execution and doesn’t eliminate obstacles but instead, allows you to manage them much more effectively.

For small to midsized businesses this concept is absolutely critical. Whether it be a new product launch or a customer relationship campaign, your plan and its execution is critical for its success.

5 Project Planning Basics:

1. Create your plan – Identify list of tasks, their dependencies, required resources and applicable timeline
2. Engage your audience – Communicate and validate your plan with both internal and external stakeholders (e.g. within your company, within the client’s company) to obtain buy in
3. Track your progress – Have a disciplined approach to utilize and work within the plan
4. Stay agile – Recognize that your plan is a work in progress and agility will allow your organization to respond to the changing environment that is business
5. Institutionalize the learnings – after each project debrief with stakeholders to identify what went well and wrong, and then integrate the learning for subsequent planning.

This final step is critical help your organization become more proficient at creating, managing, and executing plans.

A final note of caution before you start planning, ensure that the level of detail within your plan fits the scope and complexity of the project. Sometimes bigger isn’t always better.

Happy Planning!

plan /plæn / noun, verb, planned, plan•ning. –noun
a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc., developed in advance: battle plans.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck

I watched the Scripps National Spelling Bee last Friday night. (Feel free to mock me – I’m an unapologetic nerd.) The thing I most took away from watching elementary school students battle it out for orthographic supremacy was that they could all be pretty great consultants.

Let me explain.

Consultants are problem solvers. Yes they do primary and secondary research, yes they’re storytellers when it comes time to put together reports and presentations for their clients. But at the heart of it all is problem solving. Every time an Associate finds a new, effective way to secure interviews required for a project, she’s problem solving. Every time a Project Manager tweaks an existing tool or research method to suit a specific client’s needs, he’s problem solving. And every time a Client Lead performs an initial consultation with a client, she does one of the most important parts of the process – she helps identify the problem and frame it in a way that allows for action.

So how does that relate to spelling bee champions?

It’s essentially impossible to memorize the correct spelling of all of the words in the English language. The good folks who publish the Oxford English Dictionary suggest that there are probably somewhere around a quarter of a million words in existence[1], so competitors prepare by doing something infinitely more interesting than rote memorization – they build problem solving tools!

Etymologies, combining forms, parts of speech, alternate pronunciations – spellers use these pieces of information to figure out how a word should be spelled without ever having seen it before. They’re frequently playing Sherlock on a nationally televised stage, and keeping a sense of humour and poise while they do it. They sound like pretty good consulting candidates to me.