Prepare for 2012

The end is near.  No, not THAT end; I mean the end of the calendar year and if you're like most businesses, your fiscal year is also ending.  Nothing warms the heart like spending time with family, enjoying great holiday food, and hunting down all of your W-9 forms.  Right.  With all the focus on year end, it's easy to forget that we business owners should also be engaging in planning for the coming year. 

Whether your organization is for-profit or not-for-profit, you're only going to be successful if you anticipate and prepare for change rather than waiting to react to that change.  If you keep running your business exactly as you always have, you may wake up one day and find your value proposition to be irrelevant to your customers.  Someone else will have come along and done it better.  Don't let that happen.  Prepare for 2012 now. 

Strategic planning looks different for each business.  For some, it's a small group of owners and/or managers informally assessing what is going well, where their industry is headed, and what needs to change in their own company going forward.  Others find it helpful to hold focus groups and survey their employees and customers before putting management around the table to analyze the data and make decisions.  

No matter how formal your approach may be, you must ensure that the right people are part of the discussion and document your plans to ensure that everyone is on the same page - and stays there. 

The old adage still applies:  Failing to plan is the same as planning to fail.  The end of the year will be here before we know it.  Make sure it doesn't signal the end of your business.