7 Business Plan Mistakes

1. Misunderstanding the purpose: it’s the planning journey that matters, not just the document Planning is a process of setting goals and establishing specific measures of progress, then tracking your progress and following up with course corrections. The plan itself is just the first step; it is reviewed and revised often. Don’t even print it unless you absolutely have to. Leave it on a digital network instead.

2. Doing it in one big push: do it in pieces and steps The plan is a set of connected modules, like blocks. Start anywhere and get going. Do the part that interests you most, or the part that provides the most immediate benefit. That might be strategy, concepts, target markets, business offerings, projections, mantra, vision, whatever. . . just get going.

3. Finishing your plan: your plan is living If your plan is done, then your business is done. That most recent version is just a snapshot of what the plan was then. It should always be alive and changing to reflect changing assumptions & feedback from all levels of your environment.

4. Hiding your plan: be transparent as possible Use common sense about what details you share, keeping some information, such as individual salaries, confidential. But do share the vision, goals and measurements, using the planning to build team spirit, peer collaboration and ventures.

5. Confusing cash with profits: understand both There’s a huge difference between the two. Profits are an accounting concept; cash is money in the bank. You don’t pay your bills with profits. Make sure you take the time to forecast realistically  - this usually means you will have to take the time to throughly understand expenses, cash and profits.

6. Diluting your priorities: pick a few and complete them A plan that stresses three or four priorities is a plan with focus and power. People can understand three or four main points. A plan that lists 20 priorities doesn’t really have any.

7. Sweating the details : having a strategy does not mean you don’t have faith Details are important, especially in the beginning, but remember that your plan is fundamentally an invitation to the universe to play with you. Make it a priority to take the time to breath deeply, meditate and connect with your inner strength & guidance. This will allow you to not get caught up in anxiety & control.

Sourced from Tim Berry entrepreneur.com

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Top 10 Reasons to Embark on a Planning Journey

Floating, Flooding, Ever-Budding

Once you start the force of planning or implement a phase of an existing plan, fresh forces will come into play to which adjustment has to be made. Whether business starts pouring in, your staff or life partner starts to sabotage, or the economy busts –fresh forces there will be.

The good news is that this is natural. Einstein stated that force never moves in a straight line, but in a curve that eventually returns from where it came and in a higher arc, because the universe has progressed since it started.

You can count on the curve of the force returning –the key to success is counting on the new factors that occur at the higher arc level. Plan on stabilizing and harnessing these factors.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads to fortune.” ~Shakespeare

There is a stage of business informally known as flood –this is when everything starts to work and comes together –the arc of your planning returns. It can seem overwhelming because with the flood comes debris –the new factors.

You can float when you routinely plan to revisit your key business success factors and proactively stabilize them. Incorporating a holistic system of measurement and communication will help to navigate the flood and turn debris into assets.

Keep forcefully planning!

Every phase of evolution commences by being in a state of unstable force and proceeds through organization to equilibrium. Equilibrium having been achieved, no further development is possible without once more oversetting the stability and passing though a phase of contending forces. As a friend of mine once said, it is about “floating, flooding, and ever-budding”.  Originally posted Love-is-the-Bottom-Line May 2010 & Strategy Stream March 2012

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Top 10 reasons to embark on a planning journey

Originally posted StrategyStream.com

You can’t discover new oceans unless you have the courage to leave the shore ~ Anonymous

It used to be that business planning fundamentally was about designing linear steps between a a current situation and a chosen future.

There are as many reasons why this idea seems ridiculous in today’s evolving world as there are numerous non-linear way’s to live into a chosen future.

Planning today has very little to do with a chosen destination – planning is an exciting, powerful journey in and of itself – a journey of BEING.

Evolving business planning concepts teach us to proactively interweave action and deep attention throughout our entire lives.

Ironically, planning today is ultimately about understanding we don’t need a plan after all.

Top 10 reasons to embark on a planning journey:

1. To allow you to access how powerful you are and to get to your true “highest-self” desires.

2. To communicate to others who may want to participate with you (as investors, lenders, partners, etc.) what your business is about and where it is going.

3. To create a structure that holds the flow of prosperity and leverages flood.

4. To design a tangible framework in which you invite spirit to co-create with you.

5. To encourage you to ask yourself and others the right questions –right questions include hard questions.

6. To get you to a place where, as much as possible, you are operating from love and projecting out the expansion of love.

7. To give you the “now” of the day-to-day tending of the business of your business, by getting ideas out of your head, “onto paper” and ultimately into a higher stream of consciousness.

8. To have you participate in a consciousness re-creation of how business is done.

9. To serve as a guide for the lifetime of your business by providing guideposts and tools to analyze growth, as well as exit points.

10. To learn how to powerfully negotiate the integrated space between the tangible, material world and the intangible, invisible world.

Whether your planning journey gives you  a formalized business plan for financing or 5-sheets of handwritten notes, embarking on the journey of attention-action planning is a conscious choice to step into the reality of the vast unknown.

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Commune with Your Customers

When you deliver a product or service, you are participating in a shared reality that exists between you and your customers. There is an intimate agreement about the shared reality.  There is trust and communication about the mutual benefits of your interchange.

This is communion; a sharing of spirit.

Within the space of communion, there is a natural evolution that is set in motion. It is a given that this evolution is a growth process for both you and your customers. Consider approaching the development and delivery of your products and services with a conscious commitment to evoke evolution and transformation.

Any evolution is a process; a growth pattern. You set the evolution in motion by fulfilling a specific need or desire for your customer. From that point forward, you are in a unique position to evoke evolution. When you evoke, you go beyond simply participating in the reality between you and your customer, to deeply influencing (impressing) upon the reality.

In order to evoke vs. participate, add an element to each and every one of your products & services that meets not only the immediate desire of your customer, but a “higher desire” as well.  Always reflect back to your customer a vision of their highest self.

Using Apple as an example, if you are selling “M” laptops (aka Macs), delivering with the clear message that your customer has everything to do with why this laptop is so fantastic, meets a higher-desire recognition that “M” laptop users are smart and savvy. When your “M” laptop customer configures their laptop, invite them to join an on-line community of smart and savvy “M” laptop users. These higher desire attributes impress upon the growth pattern of evolution –deepening the relationship with your customer, as well as evoking qualities of co-creation, self-esteem and community.

Think of your products & services as an invitation to an intimate interchange with your customer vs. an exchange –this is the access to communion. An interchange is spirit-to-spirit vs. an ego-to-ego exchange.

If you choose to hold and maintain the interchange of communion with sacred gloves, you impress upon the evolution implicit in communion. Impressing with loving consciousness is the opportunity to influence the highest evolution for business, the planet, and humanity. Originally posted 2010 LBL & 2012 Strategy Stream.

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Get Over It

Originally posted Strategy Stream 

Fundamentally, planning is about creating the steps between a current situation and a chosen future.

We intuitively know how to take creative energy and form it into a plan that has the potential to attract what we need and desire.

Often, frustration occurs when as soon as implementation commences we continue to expect specific linear results and we become lost and identified with goals and the structure itself.

How can we relax when there are bills to be paid and our plan requires x amount of perfect customers to purchase x amount of our perfect products and services?

One option is to go after targets no matter what – ignoring our health, stomping over competitors and employees, short-changing customers, destroying the planet and ignoring our values.  Or, we could simply give up. Or……not.

Another option is to recognize and get over the fact that after we plan what we want, the specific linear results from specific actions phase is over.

Growth will automatically occur once you put a plan in action. It is natural as well that external resistance, internal doubt, and ATTACHMENTS will arise.

Once your plan is intact and implementation begins, it is imperative to to be attentive, enthralled, fascinated, and non-judgmental about EVERYTHING that shows up.

We must then be willing to intervene if necessary and modify external actions with the feedback we receive both internally and externally.  The external is our environment, the internal is feedback we receive when we PAUSE, BREATH, let go and access a deeper knowing.

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Tarzan on Goal Setting by Charles MacInerney, co-founder and instructor Living Yoga

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Be Respons-able vs Respons-ible

Originally posted Strategy Stream 

If you are acting from feelings of responsibility in your business, more than likely you’re experiencing a sense of disconnection from joy. Being “ible” vs “able” implies a disconnect from the deep and essential internal Self: it implies a belief that empowers the external world more than your deep essential, authentic presence of being aka “I must, have, should do (fill in the blank), in order to (fill in the blank).”

When you act from motivations of obligation, like “I should, I must, I can, therefore I have to,” you act from inwardly contracting energies. A contraction inwardly most often results in feelings of despondency, and loss of energy.

As you come into a more profound state of being, whereby you honor your inner connection and authentic nature even more, the natural result is recognizing the “Responsibility Energy” as divisive and almost destructive rather than something that inspires you or any one else.  It is a very different energy than being response-able.

Being response-able in all areas of your business and life aligns more with motivations that are rooted in spontaneous expressions of loving kindness and true purposeful motivations. Being respons-able allows you to authentically “be”.

Don’t allow a habitual pattern of “Responsibility Energy” to dictate your actions. Be alive, present, aware and simply responsive in a pure and non-contrived manner.

Be present, joyful and response-able.

Reference Catherine Bean Weser and DK – One Life

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Shiny & New

A Beautiful Walk Inside You ~ Rumi

Through this blood veil, the lover sees a beautiful walk

Reason says, There are only six directions: north, east, south, west, up, and down.

There is no way out of those limits.

Love says, But I have many times escaped.

Reason comes to a marketplace and begins haggling prices.

Love wanders away with other business to transact, something to do with incomparable beauty.

There are secret things happening.

Hallaj listens to whispers and walks off the speaker’s platform onto a scaffold.

Dreg-drinkers have love perceptions that reasonable men fiercely deny.

They say, we cannot go barefooted in that courtyard. There is nothing but thorns through there.

Love answers, The thorns are inside you.

Be silent, and pull what hurts out of your loving’s foot.

Then you will see gardens with secluded rose bowers, and they will all be inside you.

Shams is the sun obscured by this cloud of words.

Maybe he will burn the overcast off and let love clear and brighten.

Why Poetry?

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Core Ideology : It’s a Big Deal

Originally posted Strategy Stream 8/25/11

Within each of us is the ability to influence and make the world a better place. 

Core Ideology typically means the Mission, Vision, & Values of a business entity.  The ideology then acts as a communication to stakeholders, from employees to investors, about what the company will always hold to –the guideposts from which to act.

The Mission, Vision & Values of an entity can be created by a solo-prenuer and then shared with others as his / her empire grows, or the ideology can be created by partners, board of directors and / or a mixture of who the business entity representatives are at this crucial setting down of the declaration of who the company is.

An influential study by Collins & Porras resulting in the book Built to Last written in 1994, makes the case that companies that go on beyond the founders have done so by standing by the initial core ideology.

It is noteworthy that in the majority of these company’s statements about ideology, there is a common thread of inspirational loftiness and intentional well-meaning.

There is a fundamental ideal or “knowing” of an ability to influence, adjust and make the world a better place.

At the core or essence of each of us is this knowing.  There is that center, that divine spark that has access to the infinite and the ability to master the material.

It is this essence, coupled with a business core ideology, that not only will drive your business to wild, fulfilling success,

the combo contains the unique ability to be a powerful Source of Good; championing a philosophy that positively influences.

Here’s Strategy Stream’s Core Ideology

Here’s Zappos’ Core Values

Here’s Whole Foods’ Core Values

Here’s an example of someone who has taken her philosophy and shared it in a simple, compelling, marketable way

Read more about creating a core ideology that makes a difference in the world in the eBook Becoming a Source of Good

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Update : the new Strategy Stream site is live!

Strategy Stream a heart-centered approach to designing and implementing strategy for small business, has transitioned to it’s own website!

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See you in the flow!

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy ~Rumi

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Walking the Line

On one hand, you want to stay deeply in touch with your inner self – the part of you that has a philosophy about what you want to do and who you want to be. On the other, you want to run a successful business.

An intangible part of you – your spirit – is trying to work with a tangible part – your business sense.

Unfortunately, some advice that’s currently available about those two parts seem to be contradictory.

If you want a healthy spirit, the advice is as intangible as the spirit itself. You might be told to get in touch with your inner desires, or to spend time meditating, or to try new experiences.

There are no guidelines and no rulebooks. There is no way to measure whether you’re doing “well” except by paying attention to how you feel.

If you’re trying to create a thriving business, however, the advice is often nothing but measurements. You have files to complete and to turn into the appropriate addresses, checkboxes to mark off, linear paths to goals. You’ll often see business books that suggest 7 steps or 12 steps – it’s easy to tell whether or not you’ve achieved the goal laid out in each chapter.

Business success is about achieving something tangible – spiritual success is about achieving something intangible.

Running a business where the intangible and the tangible coexist is today’s challenge.  The good news is there are more and more people talking about how to do this.  It takes a community to make it happen and a vision to shift the consciousness of business.

Tell us about how you are doing it or how someone you know is.

We will keep you posted here about people who are walking the line with grace and ease.

Heart-Centered-Programs

Strategy Stream

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