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How do you accomplish what is important? It takes discipline and scheduling to accomplish tasks that are important but not urgent. These tasks are recognized as important, yet many people cannot accomplish important tasks such as becoming fluent in a language, learning to play a musical instrument, or writing a personal or business plan because they choose urgent tasks instead.

Here is an example. It may be important to you to stay physically fit. If you are fit now, it is because you have maintained an exercise program over time. Each exercise time was not urgent, but completing each exercise period over time was important. That meant you scheduled each exercise time and did the exercising at the appointed time. You also recognize that if you do not continue exercising, you will not continue to be physically fit. If you allow the “something that came up” to keep you from the scheduled exercise period, you will lose your physical fitness.

The steps: (1) identify what is important, (2) determine what actions are necessary to accomplish the important task, (3) schedule the time for the steps to accomplish the task, and (4) practice discipline to maintain the schedule.

First, what is important? Can you put it in writing? If you can, you have a strategy. A strategy is a narrative of what is important to you. If you do not have a strategy, then create one. But since we have only thirty minutes, let’s not overthink it.

Take no more than five minutes and a blank sheet of paper and list what is important to you. After five minutes, categorize what you have written. For example, you may have written the following list of what is important: “supporting my family, maintaining my health, contributing to the community, and leaving something behind for those who follow me.” These can be categorized into: “family, health, community, and legacy.”

Now take five minutes, look at your calendar, and review the last four weeks. On a separate sheet of paper, categorize the activities and list the average hours per week you engage in the activities. For example, in an average week of 168 hours, you might spend 49 hours sleeping. You might spend 21 hours eating. You might spend 14 hours on personal hygiene and care. You might spend 40 hours working. You might spend 4 hours exercising. You might spend 4 hours running errands. This leaves 36 hours. For most of us what we do with those 36 hours is based on a sense of urgency rather than a decision about what was important. Nonetheless, categorize the activities you did for that time. Notice if any of these categories match the important categories you listed before.

Start with a clean sheet and in five minutes answer the question: “What do I desire?” You should be selfish – list what you want most out of life in terms of what makes you happy or satisfied.

You now have three sheets of paper and we are fifteen minutes in. One sheet lists the first important items that came to mind, one lists what you have chosen to do with your time, and one lists your desires. Is there a coherence? Do the personal values you have as to what is important match how you spend your time? Is that really what you want? A strategy helps us put these things together by documenting your careful consideration of what is important and desired to enable better day-to-day decisions about how to spend your time. In the next five minutes again write down what you think is important but also list the tasks that are required to accomplish what is important. This is a way of articulating your values and is a written strategy.

During the ten minutes you have left, compute the time you have available in the average week and schedule the times you will devote to tasks that are important. The tasks should have reasonable milestones and timelines. The scheduled times should be times you can be focused and productive. You will probably not have enough time for all the things you listed as important. You must prioritize your important tasks (thus amending your strategy). Even if you only have time to complete the tasks for one important project, that is much better than not planning, responding only to urgent items, and failing to accomplish anything important.

In a half an hour you have now accomplished something most people never do. You have a strategy and a plan. Now you have the perspective and a reasonable method to accomplish the scheduled important tasks. The discipline of execution – actually maintaining the schedule and completing the tasks is not easy, but it is impossible without the strategy and the plan.

Keep repeating this exercise and revise your strategy and plan as needed. Hey, it only takes half an hour!

Celebrate reaching your milestones and goals. Enjoy the success and satisfaction that comes from accomplishing important tasks and projects.

Business risk is the risk that the business will falter and the entire investment of time and money the owner placed in the business will be lost. For most business owners the motivation for starting a business is that at some point there will be a wealth building event from business ownership. But it is a flip of the coin – half of businesses started will fail. If you own an interest in the typical small to medium sized business, there is a greater than fifty percent chance the business will fail in the first five years.¹ The four most common reasons for failure: (1) poor marketing (forecasting and adequate budget), (2) inadequate management (founders understand production or services but fail to appropriately oversee employees), (3) financing (lack of working capital), and (4) lack of effective business planning.² From my years of experience as a business consultant, I can tell you that if you engage in effective business planning, your business will not fail. If you are effectively planning, you will not make the mistakes involved in the first three reasons for business failure. Effective business planning, like most worthwhile endeavors, is not easy but for those who learn how it can be what makes wealth building possible.

The wealth building event occurs where the investment of time and money in the business is converted into cash in the owner’s personal account subject to investment risk not business risk. Compare business risk to personal investment risk. Business risk is inherent to the operation of a business – it is the uncertainty about whether a company will be successful and generate a profit. Where the business does not perform well, money and time spent on the business will be lost. For most small to medium sized businesses, the risk cannot be diversified over different markets and products. Investment risk is the risk that an investment will lose value. This can happen for a number of reasons, including factors like overall market fluctuations or inflation. However, a investment portfolio can be diversified and be managed to avoid loss of capital. While there is still a risk of loss with investment risk, as compared to business risk, the risk is greatly reduced. If money derived from the business is converted from business risk to personal investment risk, the possibility of financial independence over time becomes more likely.

The secret of planning is that you have to start at the end and work to the beginning. If you want a wealth building event in five years, envision what that looks like. For a business owner, it will most likely be a sale of the business interest for maximum value, removing the value built up in the business at business risk to cash in your personal account at investment risk. That basic strategy can be the beginning of the effective business planning that will make such a wealth building event possible. I call that strategy Prior Diligence, and I describe how to create and execute that strategy and business plan in detail at my Substack site Owning a Business (https://rickriebesell.substack.com/).

Prior Diligence is a strategy that is the basis for planning to accomplish the result of realizing the highest possible value from ownership of a business interest. The components of Prior Diligence are: separation of the owner from management, the presence of co-owners, the implementation of a buy-sell agreement among the owners, a sale to an unrelated outside buyer, and management of the business with dynamic planning. All of these components are described with more detail in the archives of Owning a Business.

You can begin the planning process at any time, no matter where you are with your business. The important thing is that if you are not planning now, you need to start. The sooner you start, the sooner you will experience the wealth building event.

1 https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-business/small-business-dashboard/longevity

2 https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/small-business-statistics/#:~:text=Many%20people%20think%20that%20small,their%20tenth%20year%20in%20business

There is a well-known Yiddish proverb (der mentsh trakht un got lakht) that man plans and God laughs. It makes you smile because even though you try to prepare for the future, there is always something unexpected happening. As we confront unforeseen obstacles, we are constantly reminded of how difficult it is to predict the future. Often this is cited as a reason not to plan. However, even though we know we cannot predict the future, there are many benefits to planning, one of which is that it enables the question, why did it not happen the way we thought? This is a very different inquiry than asking what will happen in the future. Planning will not help us be any better at predicting the future, but it does allow a better reaction when unforeseen events occur.

In a business, a plan implies a group. A business owner who plans by looking in a mirror will not create a successful plan. The essence of a business plan is the communication of the plan, and almost all the time that means the plan has to be written on some format that will support communication to the group. But the communication must go both ways. The decision-making must involve the group such that it is group decision-making.

The initial plan process is to set goals. For a business, the owners need to understand and be able to articulate their values and they need to perceive the values of the others involved in the business. These values will shape and define the usual goals of profitability and growth.

Setting the business goals will define the entire business plan, which will seek to take actions to achieve the goals. Setting the goals is a function of group decision-making. It is the totality of the actions of the group of individuals that constitute the business that will determine whether goals are met. If the goals of the plan do not make sense to some members of the group of individuals that constitute the business, it is less likely that the plan will be successful. The communication flows both ways where the sense of the group is communicated to the owners before the goals are set. We are defining what is desired as a group for the business. Note that we have not yet tried to predict the future!

The management of a business will create actions to reach the plan goals. These actions will be of varying degrees of innovation. Some actions will be tried and true, while others involve change and a new approach. These results of these actions must be monitored. The minute we rely on a tried and true action to produce results, it does not. Certainly, we cannot depend on new actions to bring reliable results. The actions taken do not have to have the result desired immediately, but the result that does happen needs to be detected as soon as possible so that if the desired result is not occurring, corrections and revisions can be made. Monitoring and revising are the hedge against unknown future events. So we are not predicting the future, but if future events affect results, we need to change our actions to obtain the desired results, the goals of the plan.

What should be the format of the writing that documents the decisions made to set the goals, to formulate the actions taken to meet the goals, to execute those actions, to monitor the effects of those actions, and to revise the actions to take into consideration unforeseen events? The format should communicate from the owners to the managers to the producing employees and back again as decisions are made. A format that supports this communication makes the planning process dynamic. A dynamic planning process eliminates the time delays involved with the traditional planning process. There are software programs that do this, but a simple spreadsheet can also serve as the basis for a dynamic planning process.

I urge you to make a plan for your business. Go ahead and make God chuckle. But be ready with a dynamic plan format and group decision-making to make the adjustments that need to be made to reach your goals. God may laugh, but it will be with pride, as you engage the unforeseen obstacles of the future with a dynamic business plan.

Man plans and God laughs. It makes you smile because even though you try to prepare for the future, there is always something unexpected happening. However, even though we know we cannot predict the future, there are many benefits to planning, one of which is that it enables the question, why did it not happen the way we thought? This is a very different inquiry than asking what will happen in the future. Planning will not help us be any better at predicting the future, but it does allow a better reaction when unforeseen events occur. I just published a newletter on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/give-god-chuckle-rick-riebesell-1qqye entitled Give God a Chuckle. The blog post, podcast, and video for Give God a Chuckle are at businessconcern.net . Please checkout my free Substack newsletter, Owning a Business at: https://open.substack.com/pub/rickriebesell/

where I am outlining the complete strategy for Prior Diligence – a strategy for obtaining maximum value from a business interest.

Is “strategic planning” an oxymoron? Asking that question and considering an answer gives us a clearer way to look at strategic thinking that will make our planning more effective and make our businesses more profitable. Strategic thinking involves considering the probability of future events, while planning involves detailed descriptions of actions to be taken with current resources to achieve certain goals. How do strategy and planning combine to form a strategic plan? Or do they?

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that pairs two opposing words. Examples of an oxymoron are: old news, deafening silence, organized chaos, friendly fight, completely unfinished, absent presence, and alone together. To reach oxymoron status, strategy must not just be different, it must be the opposite of planning – actions to be taken to reach goals.

Strategy is deciding what is important. It is determining where you want to be. Strategy asks: in what arena will you will do best? Strategy requires computing the probability of future events. None of this is planning. The plan narrative describes how to move toward where you want to be – how to take actions toward accomplishing certain goals – with resources that you now have.

What is important to an owner is determined by the owner’s values, and, for the business, the owner’s values with respect to the business. For an owner, the success of the business will not only be the profitability of the business, but also the receipt personally of the direct benefit of owning the business. An owner’s strategy will define what is important and what needs to be done to deliver the benefit of owning the business to the owner. A statement of an owner’s strategy might be, for example, to own the business not more than five years with a sale for maximum value of the business interest placing the sale proceeds out of business risk and into the owner’s investment account.

Yet, even when owners do strategic planning, which is not often, I do not find a statement of owner strategy in the strategic plan. There are goals, presumably based on strategy, and the “strategic plan” is drafted as a long-term plan for the business with stated goals based on unexpressed assumptions about strategy. Many times when I review such a plan, the goals reflect no strategy other than a purpose to be as profitable as possible. I think this lack of thinking about strategy occurs because thinking about strategy is hard to do. But it is well worth doing.

Creating a strategy need not take a long time but it does take some contemplative thinking – that is the hard part and the part that invokes procrastination. For the sake of clarity, I recommend taking things in order of importance. Start with the values of the owner. Can the owner articulate the owner’s values? If not, the determination of what is important becomes impossible. What are the owner’s values with respect to the business? These of course will be determined by the values of the owner.

Once the owner can make a statement about what is important about the business to the owner, the owner should share these values with respect to the business with the other owners. This sharing requires the other owners also to have the ability to articulate their values with respect to the business. This process of the owners deciding about what is important about what the business does and where it does it is strategy, not planning. Most of the time it is not done, because the strategy step is skipped and the initial step begins with the planning process. What appears to be urgent (“we need a plan”) is attended to while determining and recognizing what is important (determining strategy) is ignored.

Returning to semantics, where the phrase “strategic planning” describes a situation where there is no strategic thinking and a plan narrative is written containing goals based on assumptions, then the phrase is an oxymoron. There is no strategy in that strategic plan. On the other hand, in the sadly unique case, where strategy and planning are two separate functions and documentation of strategy is a prerequisite for setting plan goals, “strategic planning” is not an oxymoron.