Start Up Kids Line

Time to revisit the Business Plan

July 9th, 2007

Do you ever notice how your life weaves in and out of themes? A couple of months ago, my theme was easily pegged as “get organized”. Right now, the theme of the times seems to be apologies. For phone calls never made, order sent out late, emails not responded to in a timely manner. Which weaves out of the “get organized” theme and into the “wear less hats” theme, which I can tell is approaching on the horizon.

I try to take my life lessons and my business lessons from the predominant themes. Right now, I feel like I’m trying to get to a “good” place, where I don’t have black clouds hanging over my head, or any more apologies to make. To do this, I have to first make apologies and then right the wrongs. I’ve done that for most things, free gifts with the late order and a sincere, hand-written apology.

But I’m mainly learning that I need to gain more focus, get more help, tone down how skittered-skattered I am all the time! I need to revisit the business plan, it has changed almost completely from the last update. Business plans are supposed to be living documents, because plan though you might, you can’t predict the future. But the other half of “living document” is that it is supposed to be updated consistently to reflect recent changes in the business model.

I feel like we need this update urgently, just to get a grip of where we’ve let ourselves veer off track. And to figure out whether we want to stay on the offshoot path or try to return to the original plan. Hey, our marketing plan section will actually have some meat in it, now that we’ve gotten our feet wet.

We’re exceeding our PR dreams, somehow magically, it seems. Good reviews lead to new good reviews and if I could ever get around to writing a press release, I’m sure we’d get even more coverage. With a revisit to the business plan, I’ll actually allocate time for all the things I’ve let fall to the bottom of the list abyss – newsletters and press releases.

          

Entry Filed under: Planning beyond the collection