Connecting Dreams, Goals and A Plan

Ever wonder why some businesses succeed and others fail?  There is an easy answer and we’ll tackle that today with a short answer and some homework for you to do.

This applies to individuals too, by the way, so just because you don’t own a business, hang on and you might learn something.

Businesses aren’t born out of thin air.  They begin with an idea. 

Actually many of them begin with a problem and that leads someone to start thinking of ideas on how to solve that problem.

Those ideas can lie dormant, or they can grow up into a dream.

However having a dream is just the first stage of a successful business.  It’s also the first stage of a business that fails.

Let’s continue.

To convert a business dream into reality takes some organization and one important step is to have solid goals.  Some never progress to this stage and can’t really be called a legitimate business, but we’ll focus on those that take their dreams and formulate goals for their success.

Ideas > Dreams > Goals > Plans

Now we have the tough part, planning and working your plan.

You may get extremely lucky and your original plan may work out perfectly, but as I said that would be extremely lucky.  A more realistic scenario is that your original plan is going to need to be revised and adjusted as you move forward.

Some of it is just some tweaks, others may be complete overhauls.  You may need to rethink and change some of those plans due to changes completely out of your control such as technology changes that I mentioned the other day.  You may need to make changes for any number of reasons but believe me, changes will need to be made sometime.

The reason most businesses either succeed or fail lies in how well they convert those dreams into reality and then adjust those goals and plans accordingly as the world around them changes. 

Your homework assignment is to go back and start writing down the ideas that lead to the dreams that evolved into goals and the plans that you put in place to make it all work.  If you have never done this exercise, you really, really need to do this ASAP.

Need help figuring this out?  Ask me, I’ve been helping people do this for quite a while.