Starting a Business - Get Some Plan, Act, Review Software

We all start out with an idea of how we can make a difference and who will pay us to do it for them. But, it isn't long before that idea gets confused.

Probably we're going to come across naysayers who tell us why it won't work (most of them working for banks or government support agencies). We'll also have a problem getting the message across to our target market, especially if ours is a new concept. There aren't too many established business people who are open to new ideas. Simply getting people to listen can be an uphill struggle.

At the same time the challenges of suddenly becoming responsible for all aspects of a business - strategy, tactics, execution, service, administration - blur our thinking. All of a sudden "management" isn't something we do for a salary - it's a prerequisite of delivering our dream.

With too many marketers offering us "best in class" business solutions we might be tempted to follow their lead. Buying a business software solution looks a relatively easy route to solving that "management" problem. Afterall, everybody else uses Sage, or Quickbooks, or one of a thousand other tools for making sure our idea works. They propose our business success is dependent on using their software.

Beware - this is fools gold.

Starting out the last thing we need is a software package that costs us money and time to learn how to use it. Maybe we'll need that stuff at some point, but that comes later. Right now we need a logical approach to solving our problem, and these packages aren't designed for people with our problem. They're designed to solve problems for established businesses - order processing, billing and accounting. Our problem is turning our dream into reality.

Turning our dream into reality isn't simple. We're going to have to work on the details, testing and modifying our ideas for marketing, delivery and administration. We're going to try different approaches, find what works and refine initial ideas based on what we discover. When we've done that we're on the road to predictable performance.

So starting out what we need most is a planning and review system. We need to make lists of companies and people we know (and can talk to), lists of things we're going to do to get their attention and lists of things we need to do for ourselves, so we can make the whole thing happen.

These lists provide us with our platform. They're the starting point - our action plan, and what we do in the morning. They also give us our review capability.

Review is fundamental to our success.

Albert Einstein explained to us insanity was "doing the same things over again and expecting different results".

Reviewing the performance of our plans, modifying them to accommodate what we've learned and using the Plan>Act>Review process to focus in on what works is the best way to turn those dreams into reality.

Accounting and CRM systems aren't going to help. When starting up we need some mechanism for describing the relationships we have, planning how we're going to use them and reviewing what works, and what doesn't.

We're going to need something like those "planners" people used in the '90s. Somewhere we can list who we know, what we know about them and what we want to do with that information.

Until we're rolling we can use simple spreadsheets to record Income and Expenditure.