0ne of the biggest things that will help a company stay flexible and help employees accept change is sharing the idea that: a business plan is a hypothesis.

Everyone has an idea for what will work, but 99 if not 100% of the time it never works like you planned. A lot of time it works, just in a different way. The key is to keep evaluating your plan on a quarterly basis if not monthly in the first 1-2 years to make sure you are doing the right thing in the best way.

We have realized this at Collar Free and because of our awareness and willingness to change we are seeing opportunities we never predicted. Last month we had a dip down to $5k of revenue, but with a few changes we have $45k of revenue lined up for the next 45 days.

A great quote summarizes this:

“ If we don’t change the direction we are going, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” – Ancient Chinese Proverb

Of course, I can’t share what we have changed and the opportunities we are capitalizing on, but here is the outline I used.

………..

1) Initial Company Plan/Thesis:

2) Initial hypotheses - then put true or false next to each one based on what is working.

Ex: We can expand the online model and go into boutiques and eventually major retailers – true

3) What has changed? – then put positives, negatives, and positives that can come from negatives

Ex: Custom apparel work is easier to close than investment. Positive: we are sales people and have a big network. Negatives: custom work is a distraction from our long term goals and is a service business. Positive: we are in business because of this business and it is helping fund the other parts of the business without the need for a lot of outside investment.

4) Thoughts to remember

• Building a company is not easy
• Perfection is something you strive for
• Every company gets better at what they do.
• Sharing the brand meaning is sometimes more important than the physical brand message
• Business plans change and when they don’t companies miss opportunities or fail
• Bootstrapping creates stress and a steeper climb, but allows us to control our destiny and have a bigger payoff with success

5)What we have to keep doing and what we need to change

Ex:Taking as much custom work as we can handle Changes: track our time, sell profitable and high margin jobs, increase efficiency.

6) Our vision – have two categories: short term, long term.

………..

I believe using this outline every 3-6 months will help a company succeed without creating the distraction of writing a complete operations plan.

My philosophy: It is alright to not know the answer, but it is never alright to stop asking the questions.

 Post in the comments below what you are doing to add vision and guide the strategy of your company.