Your Best-Laid Plans

Change is constant, so it should be no surprise that despite your best efforts to predict the future, things aren't going exactly as planned.  I'm sure something has/is happening in Q1 that you had not anticipated.

Since we can't stop change, we have to look at how best to manage our reactions to it. Planning gives us an anchor, a touchstone to come back to that reminds us of what we hope to accomplish even if the methods need to change due to new circumstances and conditions.

Perhaps your Q1 brought a slew of new qualified leads and new business. This may have accelerated your plans to add staff or technology and tabled some of your prospecting and marketing efforts.

Or maybe supply chain slow downs are making it hard to hit fulfillment goals and you are spending more time on client relationship management and procurement at the expense of documenting policies and procedures.

Most of us would think of scenario A as a "good" change in plans and scenario B as a "bad" one. In fact, they're neither good nor bad, they’re simply the circumstances at hand.

Both create disruptions.

Both can take focus off the areas of your business where you have determined need attention.

Both can distract you for longer term goals if you let them.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "we had a marketing and sales plan but then we got a new client and it got tabled." I hear this when the owner is now looking at an empty prospect pipeline and wishes they hadn't put off business development efforts yet again.

Or I talk to an owner when a crises like supply change delays is resolved and how they have to ramp up operations to manage a backlog of work only to find that their imperfect, idiosyncratic processes and workflows are causing the same old problems now at a larger scale.

Changes in circumstances may alter how your plan is executed. But it can’t be an excuse to throw your plan out the window.

Because change can also create opportunities.

Cue your creativity: You’ve been handed a great opportunity to use your plan as a lens for shaping your response to change and a guide for creating new paths forward.

As you wrap up Q1 it's a great time to revisit your goals and update your plan based on real-time information.

• Acknowledge how the unforeseeable is impacting business as usual and decide how best to leverage the circumstances to stay aligned to your vision.
• Focus on the things you can control.
• Stay committed to projects you know will make your business stronger and more profitable over time.
• Bring together your trusted staff and advisors to give you new perspectives.
• Give yourself and others grace.
• Slow is better than stopped.

Remember, your job as owner is to see beyond and motivate an aligned team toward a shared vision. That can be harder to do when things aren't going as planned.

But it's not impossible.

Stay the course.