I’m sure you’ve heard the same. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I believe that very much because I believe it is very important to plan.
There is a personality test out there called the KOLBE, and it will tell you how much of a planner you are on a scale of one to 10. Personally, I’m an eight. I like to plan things out, so I like to know in advance everything that’s going to happen. I ask a million questions. When I’m preparing to give a speech or presentation, for example, I want to know: Who’s going to be in the audience? How many women are there going to be? Are there any topics I need to cover specifically? What time should I arrive? Do I need to bring food? … I literally want to know everything.
I like to plan ahead, and that planning is usually good. But, you can also get to the point, especially in business, where your super-planning personality becomes a detriment to your business. That’s why, planning isn’t everything in your business. I can’t tell you how many times in my business that I have set up 12-month content calendars or 90-day marketing plans, only to literally dump all of that planning in the trash because, for one reason or another, I realize that this plan, this direction, isn’t going to work.
Honestly, I can’t tell you how many hours and hours and hours I have spent year after year after year in December trying to figure out what am I going to do for the next year to grow and scale my business only to have everything that I put together be totally changed in less than three months later. Less than three months later, I have a new idea, a new mentor, or a new coach, and then decide that this needs to pivot because this direction I was going is not the direction that I want to keep going. That’s why planning is not everything.
Execution, however, is.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what you get accomplished, what you actually get done. This is the only way that you can move forward, because as you execute in your business, as you start to put into action your ideas, you’re going to learn each step of the way. I’ve learned that if you actually try to plan too much too far ahead, then pivoting when you need to becomes more difficult. You don’t want to throw away the planning and the work you’ve done, which means you’ll just keep going and going, even if you know it’s not the right direction for you or your business right now.
Recently, I realized that I almost always fail to plan a Black Friday special for my business ahead of time, even though I know this would be a good idea. Each year Black Friday comes and goes, and I’m left thinking, “Well, I’ll do it next year. Next year, I’ll have my entire funnel built and ready.”
This year, however, I decided to take part in a Black Friday challenge, one that asked us to put together a funnel in just a matter of days. So, there I was the Tuesday before Black Friday, putting together my offer and everything, what I was going to include, etc. I was literally inventing everything on the fly. I honestly didn’t even know what my product or pitch was going to be. But, by the end of the challenge, I had it all put together. And it literally came down to the wire. I finished everything within a short 90-minute time frame — time that I only had because my flight happened to be late.
And, when Black Friday quickly rolled around, my funnel was live — and we actually sold a couple thousand dollars of this new program that I put together in literally just a couple of hours.
None of this would have happened, however, if I had stuck to my planning personality and put it off for yet another year.
Planning is NOT everything!
Sometimes you just need to get out of your comfort zone. It’s not going to be perfect. There might be a broken link. The design may not be perfect, emails may not be 100% proofread, there might be a spelling mistake. That’s okay. I’m going to just execute. I’m going to move forward because that’s a couple extra thousand dollars of revenue that got added to my business that would not have existed if I had stuck to that stage of I need to plan this out 100% perfectly, or else it can’t be launched at all. Bottom line, planning is not everything — so get out of your own way.