Everything Begins With a Plan

"Preparation is the key to success" - Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor of the telephone

When you start your own enterprise you’re going to learn hard and fast that planning and organisation are key activities in getting things done (and done well).

In this article, we’re going to give you some simple techniques for making sure that you plan things efficiently.

Start the day right

Before you lift open your laptop lid or switch on your monitor, it’s vital that you know exactly what you’re going to do first. What’s your main priority? What’s going to have the biggest effect? If you aimlessly jump onto the internet, you’re going to get distracted and lose precious time.

Building a plan

1. Decide what the goal is which will subsequently decide what the  plan is for. It could be a 5 year plan, a 1 year plan, a marketing plan, a recruitment plan, a social media plan...
2. Bring together the key people on your team (this might just be you) and ask them for their input.
3. Structure your plan in reverse, starting with your end goal and moving back to your current position. What does the in-between consist of? Write down each step on post it notes. 
4. What tools and resources will you need?
5. Explore all angles and avenues. At each stage ask why? What? How? Where? Who? etc
6. Use well-known visual plan aids, such as Gantt charts or mind maps. We use Asana.
7. Be detailed.

Creating order

If you have a team, get them together and ask them all what needs to be done. If it’s just you, you can do this yourself. Put all of the tasks on post-it notes and start ordering them in terms of importance and priority. You might notice that some of these things are milestones, some are tasks, and some are sub-tasks. Create a system that works for you, and you’ll start seeing ways that you can tick off multiple tasks more efficiently by going down certain routes. These post-it notes will form the map of your upcoming work.

Tip: The 80/20 method (Pareto Principle) will help your structure your work for impact.

Project management

Take your map or list of things that need to be done and plug them into a project management tool. We use Asana, which allows us to give tasks to the relevant team member and follow their updates. It’s well organised and allows us to keep on top of everything. You can upload documents, set deadlines, and break down projects into teams. It’s incredibly helpful and versatile, exactly what your plan needs!

Measurement

Take the post it notes and add a date and a performance indicator for measurement.

The sum of all the parts

When your enterprise is up and running, you will be able to look back on the success as the sum of all the small parts along the way. One way to ensure this happens smoothly is to break down all of your tasks and sub-tasks down to their smallest part. A task labelled ‘Build a website’ is not detailed enough, you need to be more specific, ‘hire a web designer’, ‘think about UX/UI’, ‘purchase a URL’ etc.

The old phrase ‘preparation is the key to success’ truly applies very well to starting a business.

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