If You Can Plan a Vacation, You Can Plan a Business

What are the first three things you have to decide to plan vacation? They are the same three questions you should have asked when you started your business. You’re where you are because you didn’t.

1. – “Where are we?” If you don’t know that, you can’t begin to plan your vacation. Where you are right now determines everything about how you get where you want to go. Almost no business owner has a “sane assessment” of where they truly are – their leadership abilities, their staff’s capabilities, their finances, their true target market, why their product or service is actually selling. We’re too busy surviving to ask those hard questions. Yet without knowing where you are, you’ll never get where you want to end up.

2. – “Where do we want to end up?” If you know you’re in Cleveland, then you can ask where you want to go. If you say, “We will vacation at the beach in Florida”, you can begin to picture what it will take to get there and what you need to take with you.

3. – “When do we want to be there?” Only after you answer this question can you know whether you have time to drive, or are taking a plane.

Once all three questions are answered, you can finally know how to pack.

What if you didn’t answer any of the three? What would you pack? When would you leave? And where would you go? Nobody would plan a vacation without answering these three questions first. Yet just about every business owner goes into business without answer any of them. They just starting “packing” their business with “stuff”, pull out of the driveway without even knowing where they are, and then drive their business around aimlessly because they’ve got no clue where it is supposed to lead them, or when it should arrive there.

The Random Hope Strategy
This is the Random Hope Strategy of business, and is the most common strategy business owners follow. But there is hope. You can ask these three questions any time, and in fact, you should re-ask them all the time.

Get a sane assessment of where you are, figure out where you want your business to take you (how much time and money should my business provide for me?), and by when. If you take the time to answer these three questions, and re-ask them regularly, you’ve got a great shot at success. If you don’t, expect the same result you would get by not asking them to plan a vacation.

Clarity. Hope. And Risk.
Stop everything you are doing, and get Clarity on these three questions now. Clarity brings Hope, and Hope allows us to take the right Risks.

Clarity. Hope. Risk. The answers are worth the questions.