At the suggestion of one of my Internet Marketing students, I’m currently reading Rework by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried of 37Signals. Though I’m just partly through it, I already have found myself nodding in agreement with much of what they say.
(In case you’re not familiar, 37Signals is an amazing ‘little’ company that is the creator of several wildly popular web-based apps, including Basecamp – a terrific online project management and collaboration tool.)
Rework is a collection of very short chapters that are essentially reworked (yes, bad pun intended) blog posts. But so far I’m finding their anti-conventional wisdom approach refreshing.
“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”
(<---This one is high up on my list of ‘useless cliches’.)
For instance, in the chapter called Planning is Guessing, Fried and Heinemeier Hansson suggest that, as a small business owner, you shouldn’t spend too much time planning since even the best-considered plans are merely guesses about the future.
And, importantly, plans can be limiting.
This last point is an important factor to consider given the world we live in today. Successful businesses, especially newer or small businesses, have to be nimble, able to adapt to a changing environment or able to quickly move from something that doesn’t work to something that does.
Overly complicated plans can make that difficult. After you’ve invested time and energy developing your plan, it can be hard to deviate. You feel like you know where you’re going, and the plan can become a crutch. The problem is that you forget the plan is a guess. You may never get to where you think you’re going, and if you stick unreasonably to the plan, you might miss other (perhaps better) opportunities.
My own foray into business-ownership began with the purchase of an Internet marketing franchise a number of years ago. It was a great way for me to learn (a lot) about the industry and about how to run a business. One of the drawbacks, though, was that they LOVED planning. And although it always felt a little silly to me to develop detailed plans of where my business would be in a year or (worse) 5 years, I always did it. (It was an especially fruitless exercise when I was just starting out, since my conservative ‘guesstimates’ were basically pulled out of thin air.)
I sat down and guessed at how many new website clients I’d have, how many search engine marketing clients I’d have, how many email marketing clients I’d have. I spent hours doing revenue projections.
Problem was, I really had no idea. And I used the ‘planning’ process as an excuse to avoid doing some of the other things that, while I knew I needed to do them, were outside my comfort zone.
Ultimately, the plans often left me feeling disappointed, since I rarely (OK, never) got to where I was ‘supposed to’.
I’m not suggesting – and I don’t think Hansson and Fried are either – that you shouldn’t be thoughtful about your business, that you shouldn’t have an idea of where you want to go, or that your business will thrive if you just work on it everyday without any plan. But I definitely agree that spending hours and hours guessing where you’re going to be in the future is perhaps not the most productive use of your time.
