The Foxy Marketer Blog

We’ve all been told and probably generally agree that all businesses must have a plan. Just as it is recommended that a pilot file a flight plan with the FAA prior to departure, having a business plan is not required, just strongly recommended. What would happen if a pilot boarded a plane, started it up and took off with no direction in mind? How smoothly would that flight go? Where would that flight end up? How would the passengers who paid to be on that flight feel about not knowing where they would end up?

Having a flight plan for your business gives you direction and purpose. The sky is vast and launching toward it with no particular outcome is daunting and leaves too much unconsidered. Take pause to craft a plan for your biz, whether it hasn’t yet begun, or if it’s still in its infancy stages, or even if you’ve been around for 25 years. Businesses change and grow, and so should the plans you make. Is there an existing business in your field you can model after? Maybe working with a Score rep from your community is the best way for you. Is there a dusty old binder in the back room somewhere with a plan that needs dusted off and updated?

An easy way to start with your biz plan is with your vision. When you imagine your business at its optimum, achieving what you set out to do when you started, what do you see and hear? Write it down! Put it on your website, hang it on your wall. Need a little inspiration? Here’s what some have done:

3M
“To solve unsolved problems innovatively.”

Mary Kay Cosmetics
“To give unlimited opportunity to women.”

Merck
“To preserve and improve human life.”

Wal-Mart
“To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people.”

Walt Disney
“To make people happy.”

These are the ‘one-liners’, but each is supported by a set of values that set the performance standards and direct the implementation of the mission.

For example, Merck, a company that produces pharmaceutical products and provides insurance for pharmacy benefits, publicly states the following values:

Corporate social responsibility
Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company
Science-based innovation
Honesty & integrity
Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity

Walt Disney:

No cynicism
Nurturing and promulgation of “wholesome American values”
Creativity, dreams and imagination
Fanatical attention to consistency and detail
Preservation and control of the Disney “magic”

Use your vision as the destination of your flight, and craft the flight plan, aka the details from that. Begin now by crafting your vision. If you have one, make sure it’s prominent and still relevant for you. Can your customers see it, do your employees know and live it?

Here’s our vision:

The vision of TheFoxyMarketer.com is to ultra-empower small business owners to pro-actively work to realize profitability by adopting strategies that get results. We make Foxes!

I’d love to hear your vision…post it below, email or call me!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 8:01 am and is filed under Small Business Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.