Reworking Your Business Plan? Consider These Tips

BY TIM BERRY

So you’re getting started with business planning to help run your business better. You’ve understood that what matters is not the plan document, but rather the planning -- effective, lean, streamlined planning, reviewed and revised often, that results in better management. How do you do that? How do you work smoothly between plans and actions, plans and results? Here are my favorite tips.

-- De-emphasize the document. Focus on dates, deadlines, key performance measurements, responsibilities, people, and tasks. Include and always update projected sales, costs, expenses, and cash flow. Make it as specific and concrete as possible.

-- Emphasize the process. Make sure you schedule regular review meetings.

-- Emphasize the people. Use those performance measurements and dates and deadlines and responsibilities well. Make the planning a way to help everybody on your team contribute, commit and come through. Use measurements to make team and individual performance transparent.

-- Emphasize objective measurable results. Be collaborative. Agree on performance goals and how to measure them. Make them numerical, objective, so you can track the results and the results will stand for themselves.

-- For financial projections, focus on budget versus actual. Take whatever steps you have to take to insure that you get a good look at budget versus actual and plan versus actual at least once a month for sales, costs, expenses and cash flow.

The key to making this effective is summarizing. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to automatically do plan versus actual on every item in every budget and forecast if you don’t have tools that make it easy. Instead, focus on getting a regular top-level view. For example, automate the monthly plan versus actual for total sales and total costs, if that makes things easier, rather than for every line of sales. Then look in detail during the review. The same goes for total expenses, and cash balance. Summarize and aggregate to make automating easier.

-- Make tracking tasks, projects and milestones easy and transparent. Use a tool that makes lists and checking off tasks and assignments easily visible to everybody who needs to see them. I know there are multiple competing web apps in this general area, and I’ve worked personally with Basecamp and Teamworkpm.net. I mention these not because they’re necessarily the best or better than others, but because I’ve used them both. I like them both, too. I switched recently to Teamworkpm.net from Basecamp because the former allows recurring tasks and handles dependencies better.

Whether you use one of these or a competitor, or your own system, make sure it’s easy to use and easy to share. Task, project and action lists need to work well and be easy for all, or they don’t work. I pay monthly fees for the web apps I use, and it’s well worth it.

And I also recommend you think about level of detail. Tasks and measurements that are shared by a team need to be just detailed enough, just the top level, so they can optimize management. Having too many items on a list makes it useless.

Some detail-oriented personalities want lists that make a simple project look as complex as designing an airplane wing. (You know who you are and who they are.) Don’t stifle that. Just have them share only the high-level top of their iceberg, not the whole thing.

Creating a business plan doesn’t work unless you settle into the process for the long term. You need to develop the discipline to choose tools and stick to them, choose metrics and track them, and make it like exercise and fitness. It works with consistency only, not when you try to do it all at once every few months.

4 Ways to Organize New Ideas and Drive Innovation

BY NADIA GOODMAN

Your company's next great idea could come from anyone -- an employee, a customer, a vendor, or even a stranger. Everyone involved in your small business helps you drive innovation. They also create chaos. But, with so much input, how do you make sure the best ideas don't get lost in the shuffle?

Some companies collect new ideas in a wiki, which is good for storing information, but terrible for finding it. They end up becoming a disorganized mess of great ideas that go to the wiki to die.

To create a culture that fosters innovation, organize new ideas in a way that empowers you to act on them.

"People stop participating in an innovation community without active decision-making and transparency," says Tim Meaney, CEO of Kindling, an idea management and collaboration tool. "People are too busy to speak into the void."

Here are four tips to help you organize your ideas and drive innovation.

1. Discuss ideas in a central location. Start by creating a central space where you collect and share ideas. Make sure you're using a dynamic tool, with built-in opportunities for collaboration and feedback. Kindling offers this, as do many other idea management tools.

2. Label your lists of ideas. To keep ideas clearly organized, streamline them by topic. You might set up broad categories, such as "customer requested features," or specific ones tailored to a project or goal. Breaking ideas into smaller groups helps you process and select the ones that best suit your business.

Labeled lists also create a framework for people to think about new ideas, especially if they're tied to specific projects or goals. The list titles serve as prompts, which help spur creativity and lead to more novel suggestions.

3. Make sure a leader owns each list. For each list of ideas, establish a point person who will take ownership -- someone who is an integral part of the team that would act on those ideas. For example, ideas to improve your website's infrastructure need to be collected and owned by the team responsible for maintaining it.

"This is probably the most important aspect of a well-functioning innovation program -- a motivated and empowered person or small team who will see ideas through to a decision," Meaney says.

4. Treat your idea bank like an inbox. To prevent a backlog of ideas, address each one as quickly as possible. Dismiss the ideas that are definitely not viable, then move any that have potential into specific follow-up categories. Some may need immediate action while others may need more input before you can make a decision. UserVoice allows one month for input before they make a final choice.

As you make decisions, be sure to communicate them back to the organization. Knowing which ideas were chosen and why will make people more likely to share their thoughts in the future. 

How to project confidence

Whether you're courting potential investors or presenting at a staff meeting, you need to project confidence. Your self-assurance shows others that you believe in your business ideas and helps you sell them effectively.

In some ways, how you present an idea matters more than the idea itself. "Emotional energy and nonverbals are more important than content," says Blake Eastman, a serial entrepreneur and founder of The Nonverbal Group, a Manhattan-based consulting firm that offers body language classes for business leaders. "Investors talk about investing in people, not investing in ideas."

Learning to appear confident is about becoming congruent, meaning that how you look and sound matches what you're saying. For example, if you're talking about your product's most exciting feature, your expression should be big, your voice energized, and your body engaged. Fidgeting and staring at the floor would look out of sync.

"Congruency is the ability to truly believe in what you're saying," Eastman says. It's a matter of being fully engaged in your message -- emotionally and intellectually. That conviction can be hard to muster in a high stakes presentation, but you can learn to do it at will with simple awareness and practice.

Try these tips to help you look (and feel) more confident:

1. Watch yourself rehearse on video. Watching your performance is the easiest way to recognize room for improvement. "Video analysis shows you when you're not being fully congruent," Eastman says.

As you watch, look for moments that seem awkward or unconvincing. Notice if you break eye contact, and monitor the enthusiasm in your voice and body. Try to remember what you were thinking or feeling during the weaker moments -- addressing any doubts or anxieties will help you move past them.

2. Speak from memory. When you're presenting an idea, it's easy to lose your passion as you're plodding through the details. To appear confident, pull yourself away from power point slides or notes. "The pitch needs to come from emotion," Eastman says. "That's what's most effective -- when people just speak from the heart."

Imagine you're at a bar telling a friend what your company does and why it matters. "Show your conviction and belief in the product," Eastman says. That emotional energy appears more confident and inspires others to believe in what you're doing.

3. Match your emotions and body language. "Movement is incredibly important," Eastman says, especially when it comes to convincing others of your confidence. Physical movements that match your message hold others' attention more effectively and seem much more convincing.

As you present, engage your face, hands, and body to help you communicate a point. If you are excited, you might walk around or make bigger gestures. Or, if you are explaining a problem, your brow might be furrowed and your voice darker. "There should be a shift as you’re talking about different emotions," Eastman says.

4. Act without hesitation. When you talk with others, appearing decisive is especially important. "Confidence is really expressed in A to B movements," Eastman says, meaning confident people show no hesitation between the decision to act and the action. Doubt makes the movement less fluid and betrays a lack of confidence.

Practice acting in one fluid movement and catch yourself in moments of self-doubt or hesitation. Ask, what is the worst that could happen if I just do this? Or, what is it that makes me unsure? Answering those questions will help you overcome your reservations.

How to train your brain to stay focused

The tasks you don't enjoy or want to do require thought and planning if you have trouble focusing. Sometimes, you can easily offload a task or hire someone with the skill set you lack, but when that's not possible, you need to develop coping strategies to make sure you can focus when you need to.

Whether you have been diagnosed with ADHD or not, these four techniques will help you stay on task and focus your attention.

1. Identify your learning style. Figure out how you learn best, then organize your workplace to play up your strengths. "If you can identify your learning style, then you can start to build systems around it," Levrini says.

For example, if have a hard time keeping track of information that's out of sight, creating an open filing system, color coding, and clear containers can help keep you stay organized. Likewise, an auditory learner who needs to prepare for an interview will recall his talking points better if they're read aloud.

2. Visually map your time and tasks. Map your day by the hour and review it throughout the day to help you organize your time. That visual cue will help you pace your day and budget your time appropriately.

Use free hours effectively by ranking your task list visually as well. Try color coding your list according to priority, with four or five levels of urgency. "Assign levels to each of your tasks," Levrini says. Do the essential, time-sensitive tasks early in the week while you're fresh, then save the optional ones for later.

3. Fidget to help you focus. When you need to pay attention during a call or meeting, bring a small object that you can play with, such as putty. It should be something you can manipulate mindlessly while you listen. "That actually frees up your mental energy so you can focus a little better," Levrini says.

In general, releasing excess energy throughout the day will help you stay on task. "The longer you try to focus on something without moving around, your mind will start to tire," Levrini says. To improve your focus, climb the stairs between tasks, pace while you talk on the phone, or simply change your environment throughout the day.

4. Break up the tedious tasks. Boring tasks cause excessive distraction and procrastination. Forcing yourself to endure them will only exacerbate the problem. Instead, work in fifteen-minute bursts. Set a timer and try to do as much as you can before it goes off. Make a game of it.