Your Best Plan Ever! Nope.

I’ve spent a lot of time building a plan and then had someone review it for comment only for them to drop one bomb that blew that whole thing up. 🎇

It was brilliant! Seriously!

I had a flash of annoyance, then I was curious … then I saw the brilliance of it.

That well-placed bomb made a huge positive difference in the outcome of the entire plan.

That’s the way it happens. When you are creating a plan, particularly if you are creating that plan while sitting alone at your desk with no input from anyone else, it is easy to overlook the simple things.

You may not see an option or opportunity that to someone, not in your head, seems perfectly obvious. That’s one of the reasons true solo-preneurs struggle. If you are doing everything by yourself all of the time you are missing out on the uplevel and collaboration of including just 1 (one) additional person.

You don’t want to ask any random person to look at your plan. It does make sense to cultivate relationships with people who understand your business or your target market and who are willing to toss ideas around with you and take a look at your plans.

Empowering your team to review and comment honestly on plans can save hours of rework when something doesn’t work. It’s a great way to get team buy-in and to identify risks and rewards that you might have missed.

A team with strong skill sets will see things that you just can’t.

You, as the leader, have to be willing to hear and act on dissenting opinions, new ideas and tweaks to what you might feel is another one of your babies. (The business is also your baby.) Remember the suggestions and advice you receive are shared out of a mutual desire to create the best possible outcome.

That can mean that you abandon old ideas that may not have worked well in the past, to the uncertainty of trying and learning from new ideas. It can mean spending the time to integrate split-testing into your plans and actively tracking and reviewing data on a weekly or daily basis.

Planning can be like that. A good plan may push your boundaries. Even if you have a tried-and-true plan, your environment is ever-changing. Don’t think so? How many times has Facebook, Meta (whatever) tinkered with their algorithm in the last 12 months? Economic and political factors are fluid and may impact your plans.

Take the time to review and possibly reinvent your plan now to mitigate the chance that it might implode mid-implementation.