One of my non-entrepreneur friends is a member of the clergy. We were talking about planning recently and I was surprised by something he told me: that his goal is to spend one hour preparing his weekly message for every minute he’ll be delivering it. So on his typical 15 minute homily, he tries to spend 15 hours during the week preparing (although like all of us, this goal doesn’t all work itself out in real life).
That seems like a fairly good ratio so I’m going to borrow it and bring it into the business world: wouldn’t it be great if we could spend that much time preparing for every interaction we have with a customer? Or what if we could spend that much time preparing for every sales call? I have no doubt that we’d see our success rate climb.
You may not have the luxury of planning that much before every interaction, but here are three types of planning you should be doing on a regular basis.
Strategic planning: Strategic planning is the “big thinking” concepts that so many entrepreneurs love to do: this is dreaming big, creating long term goals and plans, and thinking on a global scale.
Tactical planning: Tactical planning is the medium and short term concepts that need to happen in order to actually make the strategic planning come to life.
Contingency planning: Contingency planning is the “what ifs?” that we need to ask to help us anticipate and proactively deal with problems.
Example:
1. Strategic planning: “We are going to be the global provider of organic multi-application household soaps. We will earn $1 billion/year within the next ten years.”
2. Tactical planning: “We will build our brand name with specific, locally-targeted television advertising that reaches out to busy women with families who want to earn an income. Using the popular “home party concept” we are going to build our sales. We have a specific compensation package for our home party reps and we have a specific bonus plan for the people who host the parties.”
3. Contingency planning: “If we can’t find home party reps with our current remuneration system, we have a more generous one ready to roll out. If we can’t build our brand with television ads, we have a word-of-mouth campaign ready to go. If our organic soap doesn’t sell well on a retail basis, we have some distribution options to high end hotels.”
Even in the example I didn’t give a lot of specifics but just enough to give you an idea. The strategic plan is meant to be the big dream to work towards. The tactical planning is the “nuts and bolts” about how you’ll get there. The contingency planning anticipates all the worst case scenarios and creates alternatives for each one.
Ultimately, your strategic, tactical, and contingency planning should cover everything: after extensive planning with these three types of plans, you should be ready for anything.
