Leave Your Business

The best way to plan for the quarter is to get AWAY from your business.

I’ve heard this from Gazelles and others as well – you can get tied up working on the day to day inside your business, or you can work on building, growing, and improving your business – that happens from the outside.

Strategic thinking and planning should happen every three months. It’s now almost September – we’re approaching our last quarter; have you taken time out to reflect on the year to date and plan for the next three months?

Verne Harnish, CEO of Gazelles, is a huge advocate of yearly planning, quarterly strategic meetings and more. He preaches that every company must enter into the market place with a plan, a plan that is reviewed and updated every quarter.

This time to reflect on your business and plan for the next quarter could be a couple hours by yourself, an entire afternoon with your right hand person or a full day with your leadership team, whatever works for you. No matter how you do it, it is extremely important for a business to take the time to think about what they’re doing and where they’re going.

In my company we just finished our daylong meeting with our key leaders, where we reviewed our performance to date (financial targets, our focuses and goals for the last quarter). We also reviewed the next quarter and set our priorities for the next three months. These days are incredibly powerful at bringing everyone together and working on the business so that we can have some control over our own destiny.

I talked about Gazelles and Harish’s work in an earlier post (provide link), but here’s a great article about creating themes for each quarter and one companies story.

So take the time. Get out of the operation for some dedicated time to work on your business instead of in your business for a change.

Interesting reads from around the web:

• Getting Away to Gain Perspective
• How to survive the storm

What do you do in order to plan for your business?