Optimize your business. Keep the long term in mind while dealing with the everyday routine. Stay the course, but also make course corrections. Lean planning offers real benefits to every business, including:

• Accountability. The future is now. Virtual world. Performance and productivity by metrics, whether it’s hours, codes, calls, or presentations. Set expectations with specific goals, then track numbers. Management by transparency. The lean planning process keeps the metrics on top.
• Managing change. Forget that big daunting document; keep a lean plan to help you track changing assumptions, so you can review and revise regularly.
• Strategic alignment.  A simple process to keep you focusing on the details without losing track of the horizon. Make sure you have tactics to execute strategy; and specific, concrete milestones, metrics, dates, and deadlines to make the tactics real. Plus what you need to plan the money.

Optimize your business. This is planning for today. Lean. Productive.

It’s about getting what you want from your business. Forget the big formal business plan document of decades ago. Forget the fact that the plan will be wrong. Keep it simple. Do only what you need. Write it down and keep track of it so you can look back in a few weeks to check what you thought would happen and compare that to what actually happened. Your business plan is wrong, but it’s vital to good business management.

Use the planning process like a GPS for your business — the plan as destination and route, and monthly plan review for constant course corrections.

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Do a lean business plan — keep it lean and simple — then track results and review and revise regularly.

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So Get Going. Start Planning. Start Managing