The Keys to Executing Business Plans: A Feeling, a Book, and Four Tools

About a dozen years ago, I launched eMinutes (www.eminutes.com), with the goal of becoming the absolute best at forming and maintaining corporations and LLCs.  Now, that’s literally all we do. We now form hundreds of corporations and LLCs each year, and we handle the corporate minutes for thousands of companies, representing nearly every jurisdiction.  Along the way, we’ve invested nearly half a million dollars in systems and technology, enabling us to accomplish incredible feats of efficiency including:

• We coordinate about 15,000 filings and deadlines annually
• We prepare about 20,000 sets of documents annually
• Because of advances in technology, we went from having 5 people prepare the documents associated with those 15,000 annual filings and deadlines to one full time person
• Our website tracks all those deadlines without human interaction
• Approximately 95% of what we send to clients is delivered electronically, resulting in an annual savings of about $60,000 for our firm in paper and postage
• More than 50% of our clients have a credit card on file, enabling for a more efficient AR process related to our services

Recently, I was asked to speak on how we keep our plans on track.  We came up with a feeling, a book, and four tools that we use in our firm to accomplish our goals, to relentlessly increase the quality of our service, to grow our practice, and to transform our organization.

The Feeling

The key to accomplishing our goals is passion.  An entrepreneur needs a passionate, do or die vision of what he or she is trying to accomplish. The founder of Zappos says “Chase the Vision.  Not the money”. 

In my case, my vision is to be the leader in entity management. 

To be able to execute a business plan, you first need a powerful, passionate,  and spectacularly concise description of what you are trying to accomplish.

And you are going to seriously need it.  You’ll need passion for your vision to explain what you’re doing to your partners, to justify your actions, to measure your decisions, to rally your troops, and to remind yourself of your mission.

So, before you start trying to execute even the most exceptionally well thought out plan, make sure you’re passionate and you have vision.    

The Book

Read The E-Myth (www.e-myth.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Myth).  It changed the way we do things.  Period. 

Four Tools

Now, I am going to share with you four tools that we use in our firm to keep our business plans on track:

1. Allocate overwhelming resources to ensure the success of your plan;
2. Micromanage;
3. Have a “fix it “ list; and
4. Be flexible.

Tool Number One: Allocate Overwhelming Resources

Once you have a clear vision, the first step is to audit what resources you need to accomplish your mission.  I have always liked the way Collin Powell referred to the need for overwhelming force in warfare.  It’s the same thing when it comes to executing a plan.   

In order to have any chance at successfully executing a plan, the first step is to analyze what resources are necessary to achieve your mission.  Far too often, extraordinarily well thought out business plans are developed, bound, distributed, launched with fanfare, and then fail.

They fail because insufficient staff, resources, funds or whatever are allocated to the mission.  In my firm, we only have eleven employees, but we have a full time member of our staff whose sole job function is to keep our business plan on track.  I also spend about 1/3 of my time executing our plan – all for one simple reason – we’re extremely serious about our plans being successful.

We’re serious about the process, because we know that to be a great organization we can’t focus only on the needs of a single client.  We want to consistently deliver exceptional results to hundreds of clients all the time.  That’s only possible because we’ve made a decision as an organization to free up a key person to focus only on the big picture. In other words, we have a fundamental commitment to investing the resources so that multiple people in the office are dedicated full time to working “on” – not in – the business.

Tool Number Two: Micromanage Tasks

I used to think that educated, dedicated staff shouldn’t need to be micromanaged.  In fact, it’s sort of a bad word in business – to be “micromanaged” – but to make sure that a plan is executed that’s exactly what you need to be.  A micromanager is someone who intensely focuses on the little nits and nats.

You now have passion, a vision, and you’ve allocated overwhelming force to your business plan.  The next step is to micromanage the details.

Business plans are not self executing. A brilliant, inspiring presentation of a business plan to your entire firm  will accomplish nothing without constantly taking the temperature of every single member of the staff, from the mail clerks to the managing partner, to make sure that the plan is on track.  To do that, you need to create an infrastructure to ensure your success.  You can set up a weekly meeting schedule, reports, or whatever works best for you.

To keep our plan on track, we created what we refer to as the Master Task List – a constantly updated list of what each person is supposed to be doing each day.  We constantly, regularly, unrelentingly meet with every single member of our team to ensure that their task lists make sense, that they are being done, and that our plan is on track. Make no mistake about it — If you don’t properly allocate tasks, the task will not get done. And your main job as the person who is responsible for executing a plan is to make sure that all of the little tasks get done.

Tool Number Three: Have a “Fix It” List

Evan Cole, the founder and owner of the wildly successful ABC Carpet in New York City.  ABC Carpet is more of a cultural experience than it is a home furnishing store, but the best thing I ever got from ABC Carpet is a great saying from its founder “Stay constantly irritated.  When you walk through your business, focus on what’s wrong.  What’s right is what you pay your staff for”.

You need to constantly ask yourself what’s wrong? What works? What doesn’t? Where is your plan falling off track? You have to be a restless, persnickety pain in the ass to create an engine of constant improvement.

People who work with me would say that I’m extremely restless. In my firm, I have a constantly updated list of what’s not working right.  I keep it to one page.  My “list” includes all of the things that aren’t working particularly well, and I literally take each task and work it, one at a time, until the problem is fixed.

And then I find a new problem.

Once I read it put this way:

1. See everything;
2. Tolerate a lot; and
3. Fix one thing at a time.

Tool Number Four: Be Prepared to Forget the Plan

Finally, the last suggestion I have for you is to keep focused on your vision, but be FLEXIBLE.  Be prepared to constantly tinker with your plan.

By and large, nearly nothing that you planned when drafting your business plan will working out in the brilliant precise way that you conceived it.  To achieve your objectives, be prepared to reconsider parts of your plan that did not live up to expectations.

Whether it is due to an unpredictable economic climate, or massive advances in technology, a key element of successfully executing a plan is being prepared to not “stick with the plan.”  At our firm, we’re focused on a few concise goals, but our way to get there is in constant motion. 

When something doesn’t work, we invest the time to meet with the necessary people in the office, meet with clients that have important feedback regarding our process, or draw in the required outside vendor resources to make the necessary change happen.

A Very Unglamorous Role

I think most business plans tend to fail for one simple reason – the development of the business plan is seen as the end of the process when it is really just the beginning.  It requires constant, unrelenting, effort to execute on a business plan.  It requires you to be the guy in your organization who refuses to permit the comfortable status quo.

To be the person in your organization who is responsible for explosive change, you’re taking on an sometimes unglamorous, unpopular role.  People will resist change, some staff might grumble, complain, or quit, and that’s why it’s important to keep passionate about your vision.

But if you are prepared to be sometimes unpopular, anal, micromanager, and you have overwhelming resolve, passion, and resources, you can transform your organization.