Plan to Succeed in 2013

One major key concept to attracting progress or success in any sphere of the human endeavor is preparation. According to Professor Andrew Leister, an Australian project management professional, “Project Management is 90% planning and 10% doing”. Any individual or team entrusted with the task of delivering nothing short of success in telecommute or brick and mortar business who fails to invest sufficient amount of time and resources in preparing for such, has acquired for that task a clearly written failure. You should remember the saying that:

‘…he, who fails to plan, plans to fail’.

 

And in yet another instance of life, it’s a known fact that companies avoid huge amount of business risk when they simply adhere to the 5P’s risk and failure amelioration Acronym which states that:

 

Proper preparation prevents poor performance

In preparing to start-up a venture or grow an early stage business for which you are passionate about or one for which you’ve developed the needed skills and expertise required to make success come to pass, those words of the above acronym captures what you must first embark on doing as the key process towards preparing to succeed in any business. The art of becoming successful financially in what you do or enjoy doing has gone way beyond one great opportunity; it is a well prepared process.

You must learn the art of doing what works again and again on schedule. Is like your high school subject timetable: you have Algebra every Monday and Thursday of the week by 9:00am for the first semester being, say, January to April. Come the second semester, May to August, your school management sets Calculus for the same days of the week and time. And that is how it goes on and on till graduation to another higher level of education. Think about it for a moment, success in a particular field of study comes to an individual when it’s delivered as a process. Would achieving success in business come otherwise? Certainly not!

 

Plan Your Success as ‘A Process’

Take Marketing Campaign for example, you may have noticed like I did several times over, very successful companies like Accenture Nigeria and Diamond Bank PLC schedule e-mail campaign monthly and fortnightly respectively. Of course, there is but one major purpose for doing such: advertise their products and services or promote the course of the organization with a view to making more sales and increasing their customer base. Have you also noticed that if a sales man or woman who sells classic T-Shirts visits your place of work every Thursday in a given month, you may have a record as this? The first and second Thursday, the T-Shirt may not appear as something you need. By the third visit you may stop the seller and inquire why he or she choose to frequent your place of work every week and if he or she has got ’character’ you might care to know how much each T-Shirt goes for in relation to the quality. Before the fourth Thursday, you’ve started considering your need for a quality T-Shirt, when you should buy and how fitting one will be on you. When the seller eventually shows up the fourth time you most likely will buy one or book to buy in the subsequent week – seeing you’ve given the idea of buying one a careful thought and probably secured a fair bargain earlier. Tell me this doesn’t work in your case and I’ll reaffirm that it’s a product or service you don’t want let alone have a need for!

 

Focus on Positive Cash-Flow

Achieving and sustaining success in business is predominantly about selling and the art of effective selling is a well prepared process. Blue chip companies now talk much about business systems or structures. Just like two or more projects by a firm result to a program, so also do two or more processes in a business make up a system.

Make the ACT of selling a well tailored and consistent action plan in your business. Don’t forget to accord it the prime priority for it’s the only way to keep any business or project alive and well.

To your success!